RELIGION -AGNOSTICISM 
AND EDUCATION 




Class. 
Book. 






Copyright ]f 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSff. 



REL1G1 0N, AGNOSTICISM. AND 
EDUCATION 



23g Bistjop $paltimg. 



Education and the Higher Life. i2mo. 

#1.00. 

Things of the Mind. i2mo. $1.00. 

Means and Ends of Education. i2mo. 

$1.00. 
Thoughts and Theories of Life and 

Education. i2mo. $1.00. 
Opportunity and Other Essays and 

Addresses. i2mo. $1.00. 
Songs : Chiefly from the German. 

i6mo, gilt top. $1.25. 
Aphorisms and Reflections. nmo. 

80 cents net. 
Religion, Agnosticism, and Education. 

i2mo. 80 cents ?iet. 



A. C. McCLURG & CO. 
Chicago. 



Religion, Agnosticism 
and Education 



BY 



J. L. SPALDING 

IStsfjop of ^eorta 




CHICAGO 

A. C. McCLURG & CO. 

1902 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cowee Received 

JUN. 14 1902 

nCoPVWOHT ENTRY 

Oi.ASS <£*Xa Ho. 
COPY B. 






\<i° 



Copyright 
A. C. McClurg & Co. 

1002 



Published June ii ? 1902 



CONTENTS. 



Chapter Page 

I. Religion 7 

II. Agnosticism 58 

III. Agnosticism (Continued) 101 

IV. God in the Constitution — A Reply to 

Colonel Ingersoll 126 

V. Education and the Future of Reli- 
gion . . 147 

VI. Progress in Education 193 

VII. The Victory of Love 237 



RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, AND 
EDUCATION. 



I. 

RELIGION. 



WHAT we call matter is known to us only 
when it has been sublimated in the soul's 
alembic, and so the visible universe is a symbol 
of the Infinite Spirit. Reason springs from 
conscious communion with the Eternal, the Ab- 
solute, the Perfect. Its roots are in the real and 
permanent, as distinguished from the apparent 
and transitory. Where there is no self-conscious- 
ness there is no truth, no goodness, no beauty. 
Self-consciousness is born of the union of sub- 
ject and object. When we view the external 
world what we perceive is the impressions it 
makes on us. The self, then, being at once 
subject and object, grows in power and dignity 
in proportion to the worth of the things it 
habitually contemplates, and to the intimacy 
and completeness of its communion with them. 
Hence the value of life for each one is deter- 



8 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

mined by the self, which makes him what he is ; 
and the self is fed and fashioned by what he 
ponders, admires, loves, and does. If he lives 
for what is material merely, he has no true self, 
since the self is essentially spiritual. If he lives 
subservient to instinct and appetite he has but 
an animal, an apparent self. The element of 
the true self is moral freedom, which is born 
of obedience to reason and conscience, which 
exists for those alone who live in conscious 
communion with the Eternal Creative Spirit. 
When we think God we think ourselves in and 
with Him ; are made conscious of the self as 
formed and nourished by the ideas of absolute 
truth, goodness, and beauty. Our first and 
deepest certainty is of the existence of this self, 
springing from the communion of the soul with 
God. We can know only what is akin to our- 
selves. Hence our knowledge is necessarily 
anthropomorphic ; and our progress is a process 
of self-realization and of self-revelation. If we 
could attain perfection, we should find ourselves 
at one with God and whatever He creates. 
Were it possible to conceive a mode of being 
higher than the personal, it would be necessary 
to ascribe it to God, who is a person, but in 
a way infinitely above anything we can know. 
I le transcends man so unimaginably, that, though 
we must say we are like Him, it seems little 



RELIGION. 9 

less than blasphemy to say He is like us. The 
likeness is true, but the difference is infinite. 
Nevertheless, it is the likeness we must contem- 
plate if we hope to attain even a feeble knowl- 
edge of Him. Therefore we say — He thinks, 
though His thoughts are not our thoughts; 
that He loves, but as we can never hope to 
love. We are akin to Him, yet even less than 
atoms are akin to worlds. This at least we 
may understand and feel — that whatever in us 
is good and fair is so because it is of Him and 
for Him; that without Him there could be 
nothing; or, if so, nothing could have worth or 
meaning. If thought and love are possible, it 
is because He is with the thinker and the lover. 
If life is dear, it is because He is life. If prog- 
ress is conceivable it is because He is the 
goal. If liberty is a boon, it is because He is 
free. If there is truth and beauty everywhere, 
it is because He is Supreme Intelligence. As 
there is no color where there is no sight; no 
sound, where there is no hearing, so where there 
is no intelligence, there is no intelligible world ; 
and our ineradicable belief that all things exist 
and act in obedience to the law of causation is, 
at bottom, faith in God. In the spiritual life 
separation of the soul from its object is not 
conceivable, for it is a living soul through its 
union with that object. Its thought and will 



IO RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and love are not merely the thought and will 
and love of a particular mind, but the result of 
the thought and will and love of the Eternal. 
It is His organ. It has its being and action in 
Him, and its progress is not toward, but within 
Him. It moves in a sphere where what it con- 
templates is infinite and everlasting. Hence it 
feels the vanity of the world of the senses, the 
illusiveness of what passes, and knows that to 
be conscious of God's presence is to be higher 
and more than a universe of matter. Its rela- 
tions to the Author of its being are essential. 
It lives not in itself, but in Him and in His 
intelligible world. To be itself it must draw 
life from what is not itself; for to be itself it 
must know itself; and to know itself is to be 
conscious of the Being from whom it proceeds 
and in whom it thinks and loves. 

Animal life loses itself in the transitory ex- 
periences of sense : the soul finds itself in the 
consciousness of God's ever-during presence. 
Hence whatever concerns merely the sensuous 
nature — as pleasure, avarice, and ambition — ■ 
lures the soul only to mock it. We gain what 
wc seek but to find that it is nothing. 

The finite, in a word, implies the infinite, the 
relative the absolute, even as the circumference 
implies the centre, and the life, power, and wis- 
dom in the world imply an eternally living, wise, 



RELIGION, 1 1 

and mighty God, whose universe lies not apart 
from Him. The conscious communion of man 
with God and with nature, as it is transformed by 
the soul, is the vital source of religion. We 
perceive the limitations of our being, because 
we are immersed in God; we understand that 
our thought is partial, because we know that its 
true object is the Infinite; that our love is in- 
complete because we dimly discern the love that 
is perfect. We are related to God as the effect 
is related to the cause, as the child is related to 
the parent, and our existence, therefore, involves 
His Being. All things are ours to know and to 
love and to use, because He is with us and for 
us ; because He is our Father, the Father not 
merely of our physical nature, but of whatever 
our endowments make us capable of, as truth, 
love, and goodness. Thus religion is necessary, 
not because it is useful or consoling, but because 
it is involved in the nature of man and in the 
nature of things. It is not a form in which we 
live and act, but spirit of our spirit, and life of 
our life. It is enrooted in the necessity which 
constrains whoever thinks or loves to tran- 
scend the limited and apparent, and to rise to 
the absolute and infinite. It is more than a doc- 
trine and a cult — it is life, life manifesting itself 
not in worship alone, but in science, art, moral- 
ity, and civilization also. God is in all truth, love, 



12 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

and sympathy, in all the beauty and power, 
which are the spiritual bonds of men and the 
gladness of the world. Only what is evil is 
profane. 

Whoever lives and labors for freedom, educa- 
tion, and progress, works with the heavenly 
Father for the good of all. Religion, therefore, 
is deep as God and wide as the sphere of human 
activity. It is more than words can express. It 
is morality, it is knowledge, it is freedom, it is 
reverence, it is faith and love, it is growth and 
progress, it is purity and helpfulness, it is strength 
and joy. It is the ruling power in the lives of 
individuals and of peoples; the gradual and in- 
creasing penetration of the world by the Divine 
Spirit of wisdom, sympathy, and truth. To mo- 
rality it gives warmth and vigor. It nourishes 
the faculty of admiration and awe. It inspires 
the faith and hope which mould character, and 
it confers the capacity to take the high views of 
life which foster right feeling, without which little 
that is great or worthy can be accomplished ; for 
the heart of man is controlled by feeling rather 
than by thought, by emotions more than by 
ideas. To be drawn to what is noble and great 
is a better fortune than to have merely an intel- 
lectual perception of truth and beauty, for 
attraction leads to union while the beholder 
stands aloof. We become part of all we love 



RELIGION-. 13 

and sincerely strive for, and religion makes us 
capable of the self-surrender to the Infinite 
Being which is the purpose and end of our life, 
and in which alone we may find repose. On the 
one hand we are under the dominion of instinct 
and appetite; on the other, we are conscious 
of the impulse which urges to the life of 
knowledge and love. The objects of instinct 
and desire are particular and limited ; the ends 
to which reason and religion point, universal and 
infinite. Appetite binds us to the feeling of the 
moment and to its immediate satisfaction : reason 
and religion move in the light of ideals and seek 
general and permanent good. To this abiding 
and real world which reason makes known, reli- 
gion leads. Under the guidance of a living faith 
we see and feel that God is infinite, ever present 
truth, beauty, and love ; and the soul is awakened 
to the higher consciousness and yearns to escape 
from the prison in which it is held by appetite 
and desire, that it may bathe in Life, which is the 
fountain head not only of its own being, but of 
the material universe itself. This impulse 
toward the divine is given by all religions, by 
those, even, which are the least free from the 
dross of error and passion, and the most infected 
by the taint of sin. The lowest tribe of savages 
would be still lower, did it not in some way, 
however crude or ludicrous its notions, have a 



14 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

sense of the awfulness of life and strive to ex- 
press its consciousness of the dependence of the 
visible upon the unseen, which is the proper 
home of the human, of whoever thinks or hopes 
or loves. 

But in the Christian religion this impulse is 
strongest and the results are the fairest and 
most beneficent. 

The Invisible Power, who is above and within all 
that appears, of whose presence even rudimen- 
tary minds are dimly conscious, acts upon the 
soul most irresistibly, not w r hen revealed as the 
Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal, as almighti- 
ness, justice, and law, but when made known and 
brought home to us as the Supreme Good. 
Whatever we crave, whether it be pleasure or 
wealth or knowledge or strength or high place, 
draws us to itself because it is, or at least seems 
to be, good. 

The good, however, manifests itself under 
various aspects. Whatever is useful, whatever 
is fair, whatever is harmonious, we call also good ; 
for the useful, the fair, the harmonious, and the 
pleasant favor the development and free play of 
human endowments, promote fulness and vari- 
ety of life ; and they who provide all this, since 
they are helpers of men, are servants of God. 
But in a higher sense the good is what is right. 
It is the union of conscience with the will of 



RELIGION. 15 

God, with His holiness and love. A good man 
is doubtless useful, fair, and pleasant, but he is, 
above all, just, true, and beneficent. Hence the 
highest good lies within, and things are valu- 
able in the degree in which they minister to 
inner worth. Life is most beautiful and noble, 
not when its environment is most splendid, but 
when it is nourished by the highest thought and 
the purest love. 

Now the great revealer of the hidden sources 
of the best human life, which is also the divine, 
is Christ; not so much because he was the first 
to point to their existence, as because he alone 
has possessed the secret and the power to make 
men understand and feel their inestimable worth 
and charm. Before he taught, the prophets of 
Israel, and a few minds of exceptional insight 
elsewhere, had seen the vanity of all that is 
sensuous and transitory, and had recognized 
the soul and its need of the Eternal. The 
prophets had given expression to their visions 
in words which are all aglow with the light and 
warmth of inspiration : the philosophers had 
clothed their intuitions in language so high 
and chaste that their words remain forever 
clear and beautiful, and appeal at once to the 
intellect and the imagination. But the voice 
of the prophets died away in the midst of the 
desert, and the wisdom of the philosophers was 



1 6 RELIGION, A GNOS TIC ISM, ED UCA TION. 

narrowed and warped until it became the talis- 
man of an inner circle, while the world moved 
on heedless or mocking. 

To Christ alone has it been given so to deliver 
the truths of the divine life, as to thrill the hearts 
of his hearers, as to make them not his enthu- 
siastic disciples and lovers alone, but the lovers 
of all men and the doers of all good. His pres- 
ence draws and soothes and chastens the soul. 
He comes not like the prophets denouncing 
woe ; he comes not like the philosophers argu- 
ing and defining; but he comes as from central 
depths of the Unseen, calm and gentle, wise 
and loving. In the sunlight, on the waters, 
amid the corn and the flowers, in the face of 
strife and treachery, in the agony of death 
itself he is undisturbed and serene, like one 
who in life's fretful dream rests on the bosom 
of the Eternal. The tranquil beauty of immor- 
tal things lies on him and breathes in his words. 
God is revealed when he appears ; and when he 
speaks, the truth and love by which souls live 
are made known. He is a permanent personal 
influence, an ideal character to whom men turn 
and are conscious they are with the Highest. 
lie is the model of pure and holy living. He 
is also an enduring impulse to the practice of 
whatever is true or right or kind or helpful. 
hy the contemplation of his life mankind have 



RELIGION. 17 

been exalted and purified more than by the 
disquisitions of all the philosophers and the 
exhortations of all the moralists. He is so 
human that the poor and the ignorant and the 
little are at home with him. He is so divine 
that the highest and greatest minds who have 
lived since he was born have looked to him as 
to an unapproachable ideal. 

With him can be compared no other being 
who has appeared on earth, whether we con- 
sider his character or his teaching or the results 
which have sprung from both : and this is seen 
to be so not by those alone who believe in him 
and love him, but by all who contemplate his 
life with clear-seeing eyes. Spinoza calls him 
the most perfect symbol of heavenly wisdom, 
and Hegel beholds in him the union of the 
human and the divine. " He is," says Strauss, 
" the highest object we can imagine, from the 
point of view of religion, the being without 
whose presence in the mind perfect piety is 
not possible. ,, " The Christ of the Gospels," 
Renan declares, " is the most perfect incarna- 
tion of God, in the fairest of forms. His beauty 
is eternal ; his reign will never end." He alone 
of men has claimed to be sinless, and he is the 
only great historic character in whose presence 
envy and calumny are silent, though he has 
done what the human heart is least willing to 



1 8 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

tolerate. He has asserted in the plainest words 
his own absolute worth. Socrates effaces him- 
self in the presence of the truth he seeks ; but 
Christ affirms his superiority to all men, his one- 
ness with the Father, and demands the complete 
self-surrender, which manifests itself in unques- 
tioning obedience and perfect love. He deliv- 
ers not merely a doctrine and a method. He 
gives his life, and demands in return that they 
who believe in him be reborn, that through love 
of him they may be drawn away from themselves 
toward God and toward whatsoever things are 
true, are right, are pure, are fair. It is required 
of them that they gain an inner condition, a 
state of soul, in comparison with whose surpass- 
ing worth outward success or failure is not of 
any moment whatever. 

The worship of the world and the possession 
of the kingdoms of earth cannot compensate 
for the lack of truth and love ; for God is truth, 
and God is love. Truth makes us free: love 
makes us holy. Liberty and purity of soul — 
the supreme good of man — is the goal to 
which all Christ's teachings point. The truth 
he means is first of all a right knowledge of God 
and of ourselves. God is the Infinite Spirit 
by whom we are redeemed from the fatal sway 
of matter; the source of the consciousness, 
which, in spite of the intellect and in spite of 



RELIGION. 19 

scientific deductions, makes us feel and know 
that we belong to another and a higher world 
in which life is liberty. Of this divine principle 
love is the fine flower and fruit; for the joy and 
blessedness which freedom begets overflow in 
sympathetic emotion. The free soul, knowing 
God, knows by implication all things, and 
loving God, loves whatever He has made. 
Hence the Infinite Spirit is revealed to us as a 
heavenly Father. Like children about their 
home firesides, sheltered from storms and biting 
frosts, we are content and without fear, for 
around us are the everlasting arms of wisdom 
and love. This is the highest faith: to this 
whoever has received the divine gift must cling, 
for not God Himself could inspire a holier. 
Love is His approval of His universe, and were 
He to give us the universe without His love it 
were but a bauble. Yet, when we look forth on 
the world with the knowledge of nature and his- 
tory which the modern mind possesses, this faith 
is hard to hold. Natural laws are blind and 
pitiless: animal life is fed by destruction and 
death. 

Whatever lives in the sea, in the air, on the 
earth is driven to kill and devour, and God 
seems deaf to the all-pervading and unending 
shriek of perishing victims. The human race, 
too, is made subject to the cruel dominion of 



20 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

brute force. The strong prevail ; the weak are 
trodden under foot. Tribe destroys tribe ; em- 
pire overthrows empire. Superstition leads to 
religious indifference, and religious indiffer- 
ence begets superstition. From wealth spring 
idleness and luxury, and in the indulgence of 
the sensual passions the joy of living is lost. 
Though misery and sin change their forms, the 
sorrow and the evil seem to grow in bitterness 
and intensity as self-consciousness and civiliza- 
tion advance. In the bewildering doubt and 
misgiving which the contemplation of such a 
world awakens, we may seek refuge in the be- 
lief in some original wrench by which the creat- 
ure has been thrown out of harmony with the 
Creator; but the difficulty is merely removed 
farther away, not explained. That an infinite, 
absolute, omnipotent, all-wise and loving Being 
should create such a world as this is an un- 
fathomable mystery. How or why it has come 
to be what it is, is relatively unimportant. It is 
what it is, and it were futile to attempt to make 
it appear to be other than it is. There are, we 
know, whom this world of sin and suffering im- 
pels to deny that the will of a perfect Being can 
be its cause. But the difficulties involved in 
such denial are more insuperable than those 
with which believers have to contend, and 
could such a view prevail, the loss to man's 



RELIGION. 21 

moral and aesthetic aspirations and needs, to 
his human life, would be inconceivably great. 
For it is faith in the spiritual content of life 
which makes hope and love possible, and pre- 
vents conscious existence from being a curse. 
In a universe evolved from the unconscious, the 
life of thought and love could be but an excres- 
cence, epiphenomenal and out of harmony with 
the nature of things. As we do not put intelli- 
gibility into nature, but find it there, as plainly 
as in the pages of a book, so we do not put 
goodness into life, but find it there. We are 
consequently driven to conceive of the cause of 
all that exists as intelligent and beneficent. 
Whatever is or appears is intelligible. There- 
fore, back of all is intelligence. Life is good ; 
therefore its author is good. 

Religious knowledge, indeed, like all knowl- 
edge is inadequate. Grant that the ultimate 
essence of matter and spirit is unknown, that it 
can never be grasped by the human mind, the 
important inquiry is, Which of the two is better 
known? The reply must be that our knowledge 
of the spiritual is the more immediate and the 
more certain. Matter has been defined as a 
permanent possibility of sensations, as the hy- 
pothetical cause of states of consciousness. It 
cannot be understood or interpreted except 
in terms of mind, which is the subject of all 



22 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

experience. " Our one certainty," says Huxley, 
" is the existence of the mental world. " The 
principle of causation, by which we explain 
nature, is like all principles, a principle of 
mind; and it necessarily involves the exist- 
ence of a First Cause, of which we are compelled 
to conceive as being the Highest and the most 
Perfect, since whatever excellence is found in 
the effect must pre-exist in the cause; and as 
the Universe is a Cosmos, its First Cause must 
be a Supreme Intelligence. The power mani- 
festing itself in consciousness is the Power within 
and above and before all things. A universe 
of mere matter is inconceivable ; for to know 
is to be conscious of mind first, and of matter 
only as secondary and dependent. Phenomenon 
or appearance supposes at once a being that 
appears and a being that perceives the appear- 
ance ; and instead of saying that we know only 
the phenomenal, it were truer to hold that all 
knowledge is of the real. The apparent reveals, 
rather than conceals the abiding reality. As a 
man's words and deeds make him manifest, so 
God bodies Himself forth in the minds and 
the nature He creates. What we know best is 
the interaction of minds; and the interaction of 
minds involves the being of a Supreme Mind, 
who is the living unity of all, who makes moral 
freedom, truth, goodness, and beauty possible, 



RELIGION-. 23 

and the same for all. God, then, is the real con- 
tent of reason, however impossible it be for us 
adequately to express His being. 

We may never be able to reconcile the divine 
attributes, omnipotence as revealed in the uni- 
verse, with infinite love as made known in and 
by Christ. The same contradictions run 
through all the categories of thought. But in- 
tellectual difficulties cannot make us doubt the 
essential truths of experience. We hold to the 
links that are in our hands, however unable we 
be to grasp the complete chain. To those who 
are in the normal condition, who believe in God 
and the soul, Christ addresses his life and 
words, and the response he evokes is the great 
fact in the history of mankind. It is truth to 
say that with his birth a world dies, and with 
his death a world is born. 

His name is the one most alive on earth ; and 
his teaching, for the progressive and civilized 
peoples, is the way, the truth, and the life. 
His discourse, which is as unique as his person- 
ality, still appeals to men, however dissimilar in 
thought and character, with a force and fresh- 
ness which have never belonged to the words of 
sage or poet. The meaning he has given to 
the word, love, as the highest symbol and ex- 
pression of the soul's deepest need and most 
perfect attitude toward God and man, has filled 



24 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

the world with light and with the fervor and 
glow of diviner enthusiasm. The idea of one 
only God, wise and good, self-existing, almighty, 
the Creator and Father of all, is doubtless found 
in the Hebrew Scriptures ; but when Christ 
bids us pray " Our Father, who art in Heaven, " 
a new revelation is made. Electricity was not 
unknown to the ancients. For them it was a 
strange and meaningless phenomenon. But 
held in the grasp of the modern mind it utters 
the words and deeds of men to the farthest ends 
of the earth, lights their homes and cities, and 
carries them whithersoever it is bidden. It is 
made to lay hold on matter and fashion it to 
every serviceable use, and in its mysterious 
power we feel there is the promise of marvels 
of which we as yet hardly dream. In like man- 
ner before Christ was born the true God was 
proclaimed, but the voice died amid the hills 
and valleys of Palestine or was heard as but an 
echo in the schools of the philosophers. He 
alone has had power so to utter the Divine 
Name as to thrill the general heart. He alone 
has opened the heavens, has unsealed the ever- 
lasting fount of life and love, and established 
an eternal foundation for faith and hope. 
Henceforth the God who gleams on the mind 
along the pathway of the stars is known and 
felt to be also the Infinite Spirit who urges the 



RELIGION. 25 

human soul to wider knowledge and purer love ; 
who is above, around, within us ; near alike 
when we sorrow and when we rejoice ; when 
we think, when we believe, when we yearn, 
and even when we fail ; the nourisher of every 
pure affection, the approver of every unselfish 
deed; the changeless will behind duty's inex- 
orable behest, the tireless sympathy which waits 
to throw about a fro ward and erring child the 
healing arms of infinite charity. The words of 
Jesus fall like manna from heaven, and hence- 
forth the soul of man is haunted by God, and 
all victory is defeat, all glory is shame, all 
wealth is poverty, if His seal and approval be 
not set upon them. 

What He most loves is purity of heart, open- 
ness to light, a mild, a reverent, a lowly, and a 
helpful spirit. His sympathy is with the per- 
fection of individual men. He is the Father 
and Lover of souls ; and to be thankful, to be 
joyful, to be repentant, to be forgiving, is to be 
near to Him who is all in all, who spreadeth 
abroad the heavens and the earth, who out of 
evil bringeth good, who giveth peace. Religion 
is no longer chiefly a national or a social interest : 
it is first and above all a personal concern. He 
best serves his country who makes himself true, 
heroic, and godlike. 

To the true self, with its infinite possibilities, 



26 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

Christ makes appeal, setting it over against the 
false self of instinct, appetite, and passion. In 
the ceaseless and all-pervading conflict in which 
a man's self is at once a combatant and the field 
of battle, he stands forth as the divinely ap- 
pointed heavenly leader. In love and self- 
renouncement he walks before, showing that in 
this way, and in this way alone, is it possible to 
rise above the particular objects and immediate 
satisfactions of desire, and to identify our life 
with the life of God and with the ever-widening 
and deepening life of mankind, until each one 
may say with St. Paul, " I live, yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me," until each may feel that 
the will of the Father in heaven is that all men 
be one, even as He and His divine Son are one. 
The principle of self-activity does not lie in 
the will alone nor in the intellect alone, but in 
their union, from which spring the emotions and 
affections that impel the whole man to think 
and to do. What we believe and love, more 
than what we understand, moulds character and 
shapes destiny; and had Christ been content to 
place God before us simply as the highest object 
of reason, he might have established a school of 
philosophy; he could not have founded a reli- 
gion : for though religion is both knowledge and 
conduct, knowledge and conduct to be religious 
must be uplighted by the glow of a living faith 



RELIGION. 27 

and suffused with emotion. The devout soul 
cares little for thoughts and arguments about 
God, but feels His presence everywhere with ec- 
stasy and delight, with a thrill of boundless joy 
and love ; whereas the intellectual temper tends 
to weaken the feelings which are the life of vir- 
tuous and heroic action. Noble living is nour- 
ished by personal, not by logical influences, 
and Christ had been a teacher in vain had His 
words not been power and grace and peace, 
touching the heart, exalting the imagination, 
and awakening in man's whole being a sense of 
liberation and refreshment. He devolves the 
whole function of religion on love. " Too 
much love there can never be." 

Were love not supreme, the universe could 
not be fair, nor life good. For this reason, it 
may be, he chooses his disciples and apostles 
among the simple and unlearned, whose hearts 
are fresh, whose minds are honest, whose sense 
of divine things has not been deadened by in- 
dulgence, nor warped by intellectual perversity. 
In them, if on earth, we shall find enthusiastic 
devotion, good-will, zeal, cheerful service, and 
an unselfish temper ; for in the common people 
there is an inexhaustible fountain of faith, hope, 
and love. They rest on the bosom of nature 
and trust the God who is its author. They 
ask little, and are grateful for the smallest; 



28 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

they can suffer long and endure uncomplain- 
ingly. They are the last to doubt the worth 
and sacredness of life, though on them its bur- 
dens press most heavily. They believe in good- 
ness and wisdom, and gladly obey those in 
whom they find the inner wholeness and natural 
superiority by which authority and government 
are made acceptable. Hence he is born of the 
people, leads his life among them, knows their 
infirmities and sorrows, and is as one of them, 
save that he is without sin. When they look 
to the Highest they see that He is level with 
those who toil and are poor. In Him they find 
not only a scheme of life, but life itself embodied 
in a Being of infinite truth, loveliness, and purity. 
His virtue is not only real, but it is pleasant, 
also, and fair, the one indispensable condition 
of right human life. 

They who seek first with all their hearts the 
kingdom of God and His righteousness, receive 
also strength and peace and joy, and whatever 
else is desirable or excellent. They seek wis- 
dom, and they gain knowledge. They follow 
love, and they find blessedness. They aim at 
what is right, and what is delightful becomes 
theirs. They toil and suffer for others, and the 
worth and sacredness of life is made plain to 
them. They throw themselves upon the Eter- 
nal, and lo ! the best temporal gifts are showered 



RELIGION. 29 

on them. The poor and lowly minded whom 
Christ lifts to his high world are precisely those 
who, if the divine principle be taken out of 
their lives, are fatally thrown back on the coarse 
sensuality and animal indulgence in which alone 
the vulgar have satisfaction. 

When he comes to them as the Son of man 
who is at the same time the Son of God, he 
gives them a new conception of deity and a new 
ideal of humanity. Since God is the Father of 
all, all are brothers. In loving and serving our 
brothers whom we see, we love and serve God 
whom we see not. The supernatural commun- 
ion and intercourse between the divine and 
the human, makes all who bear God's truth and 
mercy to the world His ministers. 

From the kingdom of heaven within us, a 
kingdom of heaven unfolds and establishes it- 
self around us. A new fellowship is established, 
a society whose bond is the Holy Spirit, whose 
head is the Saviour, who yielded to death, that 
he might attest the supremacy of life, by wrest- 
ing victory from the hands of the all-destroyer. 
In this home of souls there is welcome for all 
without distinction ; for on all the love of the 
heavenly Father rests, and to save all His Son 
came into the world, emptying himself of his 
divinity, that he might stoop to the lowest and 
pass no sorrow by; that he might become the 



30 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

servant of all, walking through the waste and 
rugged places, seeking and finding the lost 
sheep, and bearing him to the fold guarded by 
the arms of a boundless love ; that he might 
touch the heart of the prodigal and waken him 
to a sense of his high descent; that he might 
bend over the wounded and abandoned, pouring 
the healing balm of divine mercy, that he might 
speak words of absolution to the woman whom 
man's lust had betrayed. 

Through the long lapses of ages, filled with 
the woes and desolations wrought by the bru- 
tality and ignorance of man, I see thee, O my 
Jesus, and I know that God is, and that He is 
love. A noble sympathy, a divine enthusiasm, 
manifesting itself in pure conduct and in eager- 
ness to serve and suffer, is what henceforth is 
demanded of those who would tread in the foot- 
steps of the Son of God. They must feel that 
for them He is more than the love of father and 
mother, than wife and children. The human 
passion is overmastered by the divine. The 
narrowness of tribal and national religions 
widens into a catholic faith and a universal 
morality. What in dream and vision the pro- 
phetic soul of Israel had caught glimpses of, 
what the loftiest minds of Greece and Rome 
had recognized as a theory or a principle, must 
now be wrought into the hearts and consciences 



RELIGION. 3 1 

of men. A power arises, which, resting on per- 
manent elements of human nature, is destined 
to grow into a world-wide spiritual empire. It 
is to be the city of God, the home of His chil- 
dren, the refuge of the persecuted, the asylum 
of the outcast, the fortress of those who intrench 
themselves to battle for freedom and right. Its 
valiant men shall break the chains of the slave 
and loosen every yoke ; they shall be the mes- 
sengers of glad tidings to the people; they 
shall bear the light of faith and the wine of 
joy to those who languish in the darkness and 
fetters of sin ; the poor shall hear them and 
take heart ; kings shall be their servants. The 
nations shall no longer toil for vanity and the 
flames which devour; and there shall be but 
one God and Father of all, whose temple is the 
universe, whose service is righteousness, whose 
worship is love. To make real this divine ideal 
the noblest and most generous shall henceforth 
live and die. The Spirit of the Lord is on them. 
The urgency of the twofold commandment of 
love impels them to consecrate their lives to the 
highest service. As they yearn for the best 
gifts, they long to make others partakers of them 
also. Every human being becomes for them 
interesting and sacred, for in each one, in the 
midst of whatever defilement and degradation, 
they behold a child of God and a brother of 



32 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

Christ Since a human brain held his thoughts, 
and a human heart his love, humanity is holy, 
and the proudest may stoop to wash the beggar's 
sores or to whisper words of cheer to the fallen, 
and be thereby exalted. As he knew that he 
could lift the most debased and sin-defiled to 
his own level, as he said to all, " Be ye per- 
fect, as your heavenly Father is perfect/' so they 
who love him, live and labor to bring forth, in 
individual men and in society, his likeness, his 
thought, his humanity, his purity, his reason- 
ableness, his utter trust in the care and guidance 
of the Father in heaven, until all understand 
and feel that it shall and must be well with a 
world which God makes and guides. 

The highest achievement, not merely of the 
individual but of the race itself, is a perfect 
character; and since Christ is the only being in 
whom this ideal has become real, he stands 
apart above all other men and so near to God 
in his humanity, even, that the only satisfactory 
explanation of his life and work is found in his 
own words, when he says, " The Father and I 
are one." His abiding personal influence has 
created a religion, a morality, a civilization, 
which mankind, by a common consent, have 
agreed to call by his name, and which believer 
and skeptic alike hold to be the highest, the 
purest, and the most beneficent. Though he 



RELIGION. 33 

taught but for a brief time in a remote and 
obscure corner of the earth, he has become the 
Supreme Teacher of men, the best of whom 
still pass their lives in pondering his words and 
in striving to knead their truth into the inner- 
most fibres of their being. 

There are but two other founders of world- 
religions — Mohammed and Buddha. Moham- 
med we may pass in silence by. In Buddha, 
indeed, there lives a beautiful spirit. There is in 
him a sympathy, a tenderness, a pity almost 
divine. But he knows no God, no immortal life, 
no infinite hope ; and his religion, therefore, is a 
religion of despair, with earth for its hell and 
heaven eternally empty. He is in love with 
death, as Christ with life ; and they' are as 
far apart as nothingness from the quickening 
heart of the Infinite Father. The Christian is 
not merely a world-religion, it is the absolute 
religion ; and Christ is the Divine Word become 
incarnate. If it be held that religion is morality, 
his is the purest; if emotion, his is the tender- 
est; if knowledge, his is the highest; if freedom, 
his is the most real ; if likeness to God, his is 
the most perfect ; if reverence, his is the deep- 
est; if progress, his is the most genuine; if 
worship, his is the most spiritual; if love, his 
is the most spiritual. 

It is obvious to object that the world in which 
3 



34 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

we now live, after nineteen centuries of Christian 
influence, presents scarcely more than a carica- 
ture of the ideal here contemplated. There is 
in it little of the enthusiasm, of the largeness of 
purpose, of the greatness of thought wedded to 
greatness of soul ; little of the warm spontane- 
ous devotion to what is eternally true and good ; 
little of the valiant suffering for others, which go 
to the making of our conception of Christ. How 
often is what we call faith in him a cause of 
hatreds and dissensions; how narrow our sympa- 
thies, how cheerless our view of the future, how 
morose our spirit, how vexatious and disheart- 
ening the restrictions and prohibitions by which 
we strive to stem life's current in things inno- 
cent. He seems to be almost as far above and 
beyond us to-day as he was above and beyond 
the world into which he was born nineteen 
hundred years ago. But however remote we 
still be from the ideal he has given us, which is 
himself, when we look back we see that the 
world has moved, if slowly, nevertheless certainly, 
toward God. 

Ambition, greed, and lust, indeed, still lay 
waste the earth, still lame the church; rulers, 
civil and ecclesiastic, are often weak and reckless 
and blind, if not corrupt. Nations still oppress 
and crush the weaker peoples ; but when we turn 
to the past, we perceive that, in spite of the evil 



RELIGION. 35 

which is everywhere, progress has been made. 
If we consider individuals, thousands are now 
holy for one who in ancient times was merely 
virtuous. Thousands merge their lives in the 
general good for one who but sought to obtain 
for himself an illumined mind and a tranquil 
heart. Thousands have confidence that God's 
will shall prevail on earth, that the kingdom of 
heaven shall come, for one who of old entertained 
visions of some more perfect city; and this 
saintliness, this unselfishness, this sublime trust, 
is found not chiefly among the rich and cultivated, 
but, above all, among the poor and overburdened. 
The moral standard has been raised, and the 
good man is no longer simply one who abstains 
from wrong, but one who, like Christ, goes about 
to serve and to help. The prohibitive code 
which prevailed in Israel has been transformed 
into the law of loving, beneficent action. Man 
has become conscious of his deathless spirit; 
feels that even now he is immortal ; that the de- 
stroyer but rends the vesture and leaves the soul 
unscathed ; that the essential evil, therefore, is 
not death, but sin. 

In the midst of the life-weariness, of the hope- 
less doubt, of the indifference to human wrongs 
and sufferings, in the midst of the slime and blood 
in which the pagan world was perishing, an in- 
exhaustible fountain of faith, hope, and love, 



36 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

of God-like life, broke forth. The soul was 
dipped in the Eternal and felt the thrill of the 
Infinite. 

The narrowness of the Jew, the immorality of 
the Greek, the cruelty of the Roman, were the 
foes of life; and behold ! here is a new race of 
men, coming with the salutation never heard 
before, " Christ is risen ! " and they break down 
the walls of separation, they wash away the 
stains of sin, and they teach humanity to the 
heartless. 

They bear within themselves the seed of a new 
earth and a new heaven, the germs of a freer 
and purer religious, domestic, social, and political 
life, which are destined to transform the thought 
and faith, the liberty and virtue, of the world. 
The agencies by which the whole race shall be 
uplifted and purified are persons, the men and 
women who, sprung, for the most part, from the 
common people, know and love Christ; who, 
under the impulse given by this knowledge 
and love, become centres of divine influence, 
saints, martyrs, reformers, liberators, founders, 
and builders in the heavenly kingdom ; who 
are mighty, not because they are clothed with 
authority or possessed of great wealth, but be- 
cause they are devoted, unselfish, gentle, helpful, 
chaste, and heroic. 

They have one faith, they pursue one aim. 



RELIGION. 37 

They follow one Lord and Master, and yet they 
represent many types. They are as unlike as 
St. John and St. Paul, as St. Francis and St. 
Thomas of Aquino, as Gregory the Seventh and 
Columbus. Their gifts, their offices, their works, 
are various. They fulfil the divine will in many 
ways. They are men of action : they are men 
of contemplation. They found and they build; 
they lead and they rule. They are the pioneers 
in whatever is right and helpful. They are 
philosophers, poets, and orators ; they are kings 
and lawgivers. They drain the swamp, they fell 
the forest, they hold the plough. They are 
painters and architects. They sweep and they 
cook. They teach little children and they give 
counsel to the rulers of the world. They are 
found in the midst of savage tribes, by the side 
of the dying, in hospitals and asylums, and in 
whatever refuges poor stricken human beings 
seek for solace and forgiveness, more in place 
in such company than in the palaces of the rich. 
They are the most faithful friends, the most 
steadfast patriots, the readiest to die in any 
worthy cause. They can wear a beggar's garb 
and not be degraded, an emperor's crown and 
not be elated. In exile they are at home ; in the 
agonies of death they are with God. Christ 
Jesus is the only being who has lived on earth, 
who the more he is loved and followed the more 



38 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

he is felt to be the everlasting truth and beauty 
of the Eternal Father. 

A religion in which love is the all in all, the 
one word which expresses God's being must 
redeem woman from her historic hell. Who 
loved Christ like his mother? Whose lips 
kissed his bleeding feet? Whose heart drank 
his last sigh? Whose soul first divined the 
risen Lord? Woman, the world's queen of 
sorrows, looks on him whom love has crowned 
with infinite sorrow, and is consoled. Her 
influence shall widen through the centuries, 
now that he has encircled her with mystic light, 
and men shall be drawn evermore to mildness, 
to patience, to purity, to reverence. The home, 
which is her sanctuary, receives a higher con- 
secration, and angels watch over the little ones, 
whether hidden in her bosom or laughing with 
arms about her neck. Slowly breaking through 
densest clouds the truth dawns, that man's 
rights are woman's rights, and that what is 
wrong for her is wrong for him ; that both alike 
have brains to be illumined by great thoughts 
and hearts to be thrilled by pure and tender 
emotions. 

In this unfolding of a nobler humanity, who- 
ever is weak shall be protected, whoever is 
oppressed shall be made free. Slavery shall 
be abolished, the ignorant shall be taught, 



RELIGION. 39 

employment shall be given to the idle, and a 
home provided for the fatherless. In the pres- 
ence of vice and crime, where men who look 
facts in the face are overcome by a sense of 
helplessness, almost of despair, they who know 
and love Christ shall be filled with the spirit of 
confidence which is born of mercy and sym- 
pathy, of the charity which "beareth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things, never 
faileth." If the halt, the blind, and the leprous 
follow Christ, he follows after the sinful. He 
has come into the world to call sinners to re- 
pentance, that they may be saved not from 
bodily decay, but from essential death, which 
is that of the soul. Who that sees him face to 
face with the woman taken in adultery ; who that 
hears the words he speaks to Magdalen when 
with her hair she wipes his tear-stained feet; 
who that is near when he bids Zacchaeus de- 
scend from the tree ; who that is within reach 
of the prodigal's voice when he cries : " I will 
arise and go to my father, and I will say to 
him, Father, I have sinned ; " who is there that 
seeing or hearing this is not forevermore not 
only a lover of Jesus, but a believer also in the 
conversion of sinners? His divine sympathy 
gives insight, and the world at length perceives 
and understands that the fallen woman, the 
thief, the murderer, are not wholly without 



40 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

excuse ; but that part of their guilt must be 
thrown on the environment in which they have 
been reared and perverted. The home, the 
state, the church, the social life are responsible. 
They exist not for themselves, but for the sake 
of man, and when they become faithless to their 
divine end they must be purified and reformed. 
Their wealth, their worldly sway, the pomp and 
splendor of their circumstances are relatively 
unimportant. That which is important is the 
efficacy with which they develop right human 
life, the life of thought and love, of faith and 
aspiration, of hope and courage. 

The all-overmastering nature and worth of 
life Christ has revealed, and slowly and painfully 
the world is gaining insight into the truth and 
regenerative efficacy of his teaching and doing. 
His aim and end is that men may have life, 
more abundant life. He is not a Buddhist in 
love with death; not a Mohammedan preach- 
ing an unending round of pleasures. For him, 
the life of the sensualist is a drunken life, with- 
out thought or love. We are as we think and 
feel, and if our thoughts and loves be low, so 
are we. Life is the standard of all values, since 
nothing has worth except for the living. If all 
things are for man, man is man by virtue of 
the life there is in him. Hence if we teach 
truth, it is for the sake of life; if we reveal 



RELIGION. 4.I 

beauty, it is for the sake of life ; if we battle for 
justice and liberty, it is for the sake of life; if 
we struggle for mastery over nature, it is for 
the sake of life. The essential thing in Christ 
is his life. His doctrines and ministries flow 
forth from what he is, and are true and service- 
able in the degree in which they draw us to 
him. The attractive forces are faith, sympathy, 
reverence, and love ; not philosophical or theo- 
logical ideas and arguments. The truth he 
brings is in his life more essentially than in his 
words. If we become one with him, we shall 
understand his doctrines and obey his com- 
mandments. Hence though he recognizes the 
indispensable need of authority, his first and 
final appeal is to the individual conscience. 

As the offer of the kingdoms of the world 
does not tempt him, so, when he establishes his 
own kingdom, whose foundations lie within the 
soul, he seems hardly to think at all of aught 
that is external. The Roman Empire rises in 
majesty and strength before him ; under its vast 
dominion he lives and is put to death; but his 
only reference to it is the phrase : " Render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to 
God the things that are God's." He is not im- 
pressed by the wealth and glory, the military 
power and widespreading rule of Rome. 

The religion of Israel, with its ceremonial wor- 



42 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

ship, its ancient authority, and venerable tradi- 
tions, is everywhere around him ; he himself is 
a faithful observer of all that the law and the 
prophets inculcate, and yet if on his lips we 
ever catch the tone of indignation and scorn, it 
is when he is in the presence of the scribes and 
the Pharisees, of the priests and the Levites, of 
the men for whom religion was little more than 
a ceremony, a formality, a fair exterior meant 
to hide the hardness, the pride, the greed, the 
jealousy, that work within, destroying the soul. 
He turns from them to the company of sinners, 
to speak to Magdalen the words of gracious 
pardon which still fall like a healing balm on 
the hearts of millions. His life is hidden in 
God — he goes back to the inner sources of 
truth and power. There is open to all a foun- 
tain of everlasting refreshment, and shall we 
drink from sloughs filled with the sewage of our 
baser natures? The most wonderful of the 
miracles of Christ is the enthusiastic devotion 
he has never ceased to inspire. 

Human love is chiefly instinct and requires 
the bodily presence of its object; but the soul, 
when it loves, finds the beloved everywhere, 
for in all times and places it dreams of him, 
hears his voice, and lives to do his will. His 
absence is the condition which makes possible 
his fuller spiritual presence. He is felt the 



RELIGION. 43 

nearer because invisible ; he is followed the more 
devotedly because nothing but faith and love 
commands obedience and loyalty. The tem- 
poral life of Christ is but the point on which he 
rests the fulcrum with which he moves the 
general heart of mankind. While in the body, 
even the greatest accomplish little. It is when 
they have departed and become a spiritual force 
that the world is brought by slow degrees to 
perceive the divine element there is in their 
works and words. The mightiest and the most 
beneficent are those whose influence after their 
death is the most abiding, the strongest, the 
most purifying, and the most liberating. If we 
apply this test, what Christ has done and con- 
tinues to do outweighs all that the heroes, the 
sages, and the saints, the men of science and the 
men of action, have accomplished. He has not 
made known to us the laws of matter ; he has 
not invented the machinery which is so mighty 
an engine in our daily existence: but he has 
revealed the sources of true human life, which 
all lie within; he has inspired a diviner faith 
and hope and love, by which we chiefly live, if 
we live in the mind, in the heart, in the con- 
science, and in the imagination. Were it possible 
to trace the course of atoms in orderly sequence 
from star-dust to the brain of man, no light 
would be thrown on the everlasting Wherefore 



44 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

of it all, and this alone is of supreme and infinite 
interest. Were it possible for existence to flow 
on in an unending succession of agreeable 
sensations, such a life would finally pall and 
become torture. Happiness is born, not of the 
knowledge of the behavior of atoms, not of 
animal comforts and pleasures, but of right 
loving and doing, of labors nobly borne, of 
duties well fulfilled. For the fully conscious 
soul, a paradise of delights would be little better 
than a hell. Love and righteousness are joy, 
are peace and blessedness, in adversity as in 
prosperity, in suffering and sorrow as in ease 
and gladness. Man's inability to find content- 
ment and repose in anything the senses purvey, 
is the soul's witness to its supremacy in human 
life, to its kinship with God. In the midst of a 
universe of matter it is athirst for the fountain 
of its being, for the eternally living One. It 
prospers in the degree in which it turns from the 
sensual to the spiritual. To live at all it must 
live for truth, for justice, for beauty, for good- 
ness, for love. If this were denied it, it would 
languish and starve, though all that the teeming 
continents produce were heaped for its enjoy- 
ment. It bemocks kings and conquerors and 
rich men and all who do not follow after truth 
and love, by which alone it is nourished. All 
else is appearance ; this is the everlasting reality. 






RELIGION. 45 

It is in this permanent divine world that Christ 
lives; it is this he reveals to the mind and 
conscience of the race; and the supreme 
miracle is that he has never lost, can never lose, 
the power to awaken in innumerable multitudes 
the consciousness of God's presence in the soul. 
As the living is superior to the inanimate ; as 
a man who thinks is higher than the whole 
brute creation; even so is Christ — who makes 
us capable of knowing and loving the Eternal 
Father, in a way the secret of which no other has 
ever possessed — the greatest of all who have 
lived on earth. It is, of course, possible to take 
a merely material or animal view of life, to 
throw oneself wholly into the things of sight 
and taste and touch, to give oneself to the 
accumulation of wealth and to the indulgence 
of appetite, driving away obtrusive thoughts by 
refusing to entertain them, or by having recourse 
to a plausible subterfuge, as for instance : We 
know and can know only what the senses reveal. 
It is possible, in a word, deliberately to turn 
away from religion, to refuse to give it a place 
in one's thoughts, hopes, aspirations, and striv- 
ings ; as it is not only possible, but easy to lead 
the life of instinct and passion rather than that 
of reason and love. But if one is persuaded 
that God is more than a name, that He is the 
infinitely real Being, apart from whom all is 



4.6 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

emptiness and confusion, then must he believe 
that the paramount and all-important thing in a 
man's life is his religion. All else is temporary, 
incidental, evanescent; the vesture in which 
the soul clothes itself, for brief space to play its 
part amidst things visible. 

Of religion absolute and final Christ Jesus is 
in himself the abiding realization. A more in- 
timate, a more holy, a more joyful relation to 
God than he in his manhood makes manifest is 
not conceivable. Is there a higher life than the 
life of love and righteousness? Is there a di- 
viner worship or holiness than that which is 
born of the inmost sense that God is our Father 
and that our sole business is to do His will? 
Since God is, why should a man crave aught 
else than to do His will? If He were not, why 
should man trouble himself about anything? 
Without Him would not all that exists be a 
mist, a shadow, a mockery? Seek Him with all 
thy heart: if thou find Him, all is well; if not, 
nothing can be well. The alternative is ex- 
cluded from the thought of Christ. He knows 
that God is, and is certain that to know and 
love Him is life everlasting. But since He is 
forever beyond our reach, to know and to love 
Him is to grow forever in aspiration and in 
deed nearer to His infinite perfection. This is 
the essence of religion, and other things are 



RELIGION. 47 

religious in the degree in which they help to 
this end. This is the thought of Christ, and 
from this point of view there is nothing true or 
good or great or beautiful which may not be 
brought into harmony with the divine will. 

As all things proclaim the glory of God, a 
right intention may convert all things to His 
service. Philosophy, literature, science, and art 
may be made the means of advancing His king- 
dom. Whatever beneficent force is at work in 
the world, in society, in politics, in commerce, 
may be brought to co-operate with the church to 
build His city, to make prevail His will, which 
is good-will to all that He has made, and above 
all, to the intelligent creatures by whom He may 
be known and revered. Indeed, the welfare and 
progress of the church depend largely on the 
thoroughness with which these secular powers 
perform their tasks. Temporal prosperity can, 
of course, never be more than incidental in 
a scheme which primarily regards interests 
that are eternal. The radical aim, the ideal, 
is the kingdom of heaven, and if this be rightly 
sought and striven for, whatever else may be 
helpful or desirable shall likewise be attained. 
Who seeks wisdom finds knowledge, who seeks 
virtue acquires ability. Upon those who thirst 
for purity of heart, for righteousness, peace and 
joy overflow. 



48 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

The proof of the love of God, which is the 
essence of the religion of Christ, is the love of 
man. Only those who feel a divine sympathy, a 
sacred enthusiasm for humanity are true disci- 
ples of the Son of Man. They in whom this 
holy fervor glows will look upon themselves as 
devoted to a service consecrated by the exam- 
ple and precept of the Saviour, who went about 
doing good to men; whose miracles are mira- 
cles of compassion for all who toil and are 
overburdened by disease, by poverty, by sor- 
row, and by sin; who said that his followers 
would be known by the love they bear one 
another. Whatever enlightens, strengthens, and 
purifies human nature ; whatever helps men to 
lead a larger, freer, holier life ; whatever estab- 
lishes and sanctifies the home; whatever pro- 
motes the peace and order of society; whatever 
enables man to bend the forces of nature to 
minister to the common weal, is in harmony 
with the teachings and purposes of Christ. 
Science, which in so many ways is man's 
mightiest servant, — bringing, as it does, a more 
perfect revelation of the vastness and splendor 
of God's works, and teaching His children to 
convert an ever-increasing part of the illimitable 
energy of the universe to the moral ends for 
which all things exist, — is also a messenger of 
the glad tidings which resounded through the 



RELIGION. 49 

heavens when Christ was born. It is a form of 
the truth which liberates from ignorance and 
superstition, from the bonds of matter and the 
chains of penury, from the foes that lurk unseen 
in the world of the infinitesimally small, and 
from the dividing and imprisoning walls built by 
time and space, if not from greed and lust. 
. Certainly whatever may be used may be 
abused ; and there is abuse whenever the visible 
temporal vesture of the soul is sought and 
prized for its own sake, and treated as an end, 
since it can be but a means for beings en- 
dowed with a principle of immortal life. To 
this danger all who are greatly influenced by the 
ideals of culture, of secularism, and of material 
progress are exposed. Religion has an exist- 
ence of its own, born of the conscious com- 
munion of the soul with God, and it may do its 
work without the aid of culture, independently 
of the comforts and luxuries which man's increas- 
ing power over the forces of nature enables him 
to provide. It can dispense with culture and 
impart to unlettered minds the spiritual sense 
which gives insight into the best that has been 
or can be known and said, while it strengthens 
them to live with what is eternally true and 
good, to love purity and mildness, to cherish 
humility, to walk bravely in the path of duty, to 
perform cheerfully and perseveringly the hun- 

4 



50 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

dred little things, which if done in a right spirit, 
issue in a character of which God and all wise 
men approve. It can create a disposition 
that makes one forget that he lacks comforts 
and luxuries, a disposition, indeed, which is found 
in all who are deeply in earnest, — in heroic 
soldiers, in great artists, great students, in all who 
are wholly bent upon success of whatever kind,, 
— even as it is found in those who for the love of 
Christ devote themselves to the service of their 
fellow-men. But though religion thrives in the 
midst of peoples that are poor, whose wants are 
few, who have little intellectual cultivation, whose 
tastes are primitive, its truth and beauty and 
power may be appreciated best by the most en- 
lightened minds. It accepts, therefore, the ideals 
of culture and comfort, and assigns to them 
nobler meanings and diviner uses. It is a prin- 
ciple of reconcilement, bringing order and har- 
mony into what were else but confusion and 
discord. It makes plain to whoever will attend 
that to live for the highest spiritual ends is to 
live most wisely for the things that are temporal 
and material ; that to those who seek first with 
all their hearts the kingdom of God, nothing 
which goes to the making of right human life 
shall be lacking; that the indispensable condi- 
tion of progress in knowledge, in virtue, in 
power, in well-being of whatever kind, is a reso- 



RELIGION. 5 1 

lute turning from the tyranny of instinct, appe- 
tite, and passion, to place oneself with freedom 
and deliberation under the dominion of reason 
and conscience. 

They who recognize God's presence in nature 
and in man, find in Him the principle which con- 
stitutes the self a unity in duality, and carries 
all things, however diverse, however contradic- 
tory they may appear to be, into harmony with 
His absolute will and purpose. Faith springs 
from reason, and reason is confirmed by faith. 
All things are for life, and life is for the sake of 
truth and love, which in God are the infinite 
living reality. Both religion and culture have 
perfection for their ideal. The method of each 
is educational. That of religion is self-abandon- 
ment, that of culture self-estrangement ; and the 
end to which each looks is the attainment of a 
larger, a more complete, a more enduring self. 
Self-realization is possible only through self- 
repression and self-alienation. If we hope to 
reach the higher, we must quit the lower. If we 
are to become able to lead a life of righteous- 
ness and service, we must learn to control appe- 
tite and make private interests subservient to 
the general good. 

If we wish to gain the wider view, to see 
things as they are, we must accustom ourselves 
to stand aloof from them. Religion deepens 



52 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

and purifies ; culture broadens and refines human 
life. Religion gives seriousness, purpose, cour- 
age, strength; culture gives openness and flexi- 
bility, a disinterested curiosity in the things of 
the mind, a fine discernment of what is beautiful, 
proper, or becoming. One may be genuinely 
religious and yet be narrow, hard and unrea- 
soning ; one may have culture and be superficial, 
unreal, a dilettant, a dreamer. But religion as it 
lives in the works and words of Christ is full of 
mildness, modesty, and reasonableness; and it is 
the business of culture to foster such a disposition, 
as it is its business to teach patience, forbearance, 
tolerance, consideration for others. The highest 
moral culture is most surely found in the most de- 
voutly Christian souls, whereas the mental disci- 
pline which makes the scholar is often lacking in 
the greatest theologians. The work they have 
to do would be done more effectually had they 
the gifts which culture alone confers; for, when 
there is question of presenting the most pro- 
found, the most commanding, the most indispens- 
able truths for the acceptance of the greatest 
possible number of human beings, no art, no 
skill, no accomplishment, by which the imagina- 
tion can be exalted, the mind persuaded, or the 
heart moved and inflamed, may be neglected or 
considered unimportant. They who have to 
guide others along steep and perilous paths 



RELIGION. 53 

should see not only the obstacles and difficulties 
which are before them, but they should be able 
to take a comprehensive view of the whole jour- 
ney and provide for every need and contingency. 
Culture assuredly may be made an efficient 
auxiliary of religion, though it cannot be a sub- 
stitute for it. It may be a corrective of the 
narrowness of science and of the exclusiveness 
of sectarianism ; a remedy for intellectual inferi- 
ority, for vulgarity of manners, for lack of intel- 
ligence; a means to impress the general mind 
with a sense of the inadequacy of machinery and 
the insufficiency of riches ; to help men to see that 
the ideal is spiritual, not material; that human 
perfection consists in an internal condition, not 
in an abundance of possessions ; that if one is 
not good or great or wise in himself, no environ- 
ment can make him worthy of interest or love 
or admiration ; that a man's real concern is not 
the acquisition of more and more, but the tem- 
pering of his soul, the formation of his spirit 
and character. Now, in doing or in aiming to do 
something of all this, who shall say that culture 
does not make for what religion also must propose 
and strive to accomplish? When we say that 
it is not the size of its cities, not the length of 
its railways, not the quantity or the quality of 
its corn or its cotton that makes a country 
great, but the inner worth of its citizens, — their 



54 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

intelligence, their character, their gentle and 
polite behavior, their upright and generous 
dealings in all the relations of life, — we 
speak in the name both of religion and of 
culture. 

But culture is not indispensable to religion, 
whereas religion is indispensable to culture, if 
culture is to be more than a pursuit in which 
the few who have leisure and exceptional talent 
make the education of the intellect and the 
aesthetic faculty their chief aim. More than 
almost any other theory of life, it tends, if it rest 
not on the foundation of religion, to become 
unreal, and therefore ineffectual and disappoint- 
ing. It becomes but a higher form of worldli- 
ness; and worldliness ends in disenchantment 
and despair. 

As we are driven to refer all that appears to an 
invisible cause, so are we impelled to seek the 
meaning, worth, and end of the life we lead here in 
the life that is unseen and eternal. If we refuse 
or are unable to do this, we shall find, however 
much we cultivate ourselves, that the stream on 
which we are borne is carrying us to a frivolous 
or a gloomy philosophy, whose principle is that 
nothing matters, since all is empty and valueless. 
We stand aloof from the divinest struggles of 
humanity and shut ourselves in a prison of 
books and pictures. Culture, if it be not relig- 



RELIGION. 55 

ious, hopes to realize the ideal of perfection by 
knowing; and it can be realized only by 
believing and hoping, by loving and doing. 
Its standard is intellectual and aesthetic, and 
it therefore has little sympathy with the multi- 
tude who are not and can never be either intel- 
lectual or aesthetic. It turns from sin, not 
because sin is condemned by conscience, but 
because it offends good taste ; and like the Hel- 
lenism it loves, its feet are turned toward the 
temples of the goddess of Lubricity, as the feet of 
Science stand in the temples of Mammon. For 
the one, life is an art ; for the other, it is a com- 
mercial enterprise. Culture without religion leads 
to dilettantism, inefficiency, and unchastity; 
Science without religion leads to materialism 
and the tyrannies of greed and sensuality. 

Religion, not philosophy nor culture nor 
science, first set up the ideal of a kingdom of 
God on earth, which shall be fashioned more and 
more into the likeness of that of the blessed in 
heaven; a kingdom which is not a polity or 
state, but divine rule ; not merely a course of 
life, but an animating principle, diffusing itself 
through the world, and transforming individual 
and social life. Ideas are the ultimate realities, 
the thoughts of God which His will makes the 
substance of things ; they are the presuppositions 
of religion, science, art, and government. They 



56 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

create institutions whose vitality is determined 
by that of the truth they embody. 

Christ has not invented a new faith : he has 
revealed the laws of the Eternal Kingdom, — 
laws, not begotten of man, and which oblivion 
shall never put to sleep. He manifests truths and 
facts which are permanent, which are essential 
to the highest and the profoundest view of life. 
All human powers are embraced within his 
scope. He is favorable to all the legitimate 
efforts of individuals and nations, and enters into 
the course of their development as an added im- 
pulse and a consecrating influence. His end is 
the salvation of the soul, the development of 
character, the binding up of man's being into 
the Divine Image. He throws a light from 
heaven on even the darkest phases of existence, 
giving a meaning to suffering and a mission 
to sorrow. Knowledge cannot reach to the 
measure of his wisdom ; love cannot transcend 
his infinite tenderness and mercy. If progress 
may pass beyond the all-knowing, all-providing 
Father, then may the human race outgrow the 
religion of Christ. If we are to continue to 
advance, not merely in the knowledge of natu- 
ral laws and in the accumulation of wealth, but 
as moral beings, more and more shall we be 
controlled and fashioned by his ideas and ideals; 
more and more shall righteousness be made the 



RELIGION. 57 

aim and the means of government. The state 
depends on the character of its citizens rather 
than on its laws and organization ; and character 
is moulded and perfected, not by enactments, 
but by the personal influence of right-minded 
and right-doing men and women, who are the 
power by which religion and morality are 
made permanent and vital. 

Good men make good institutions ; good in- 
stitutions do not make good men. They who 
lose character lose the power, not merely to 
govern themselves, but to be rightly governed. 
Probably this may be seen to be true more 
plainly in a democracy than in other political 
constitutions. Now, the Christian life, the 
Christian character, is the most vital social in- 
fluence, the most enduring social bond. It is 
this that has made possible what is best in our 
actual world ; it is this that must foster, sustain, 
and perfect the individual and the family, the 
Church and the State, if we are to preserve and 
increase our rich inheritance, and hasten the 
coming of the kingdom of God in ourselves 
and in the world around us. 



II. 

AGNOSTICISM. 

TO understand the present we must know 
the past, and to get a clear and compre- 
hensive view of a prevalent opinion or belief 
we must study the conditions from which it has 
been evolved. If agnosticism — the theory of 
nescience in whatever is not purely phenom- 
enal — prevails widely among intelligent men in 
our day, it is not to be imagined that this is a 
new creed. It is but a form of skepticism, of 
the doubt of the possibility of objective knowl- 
edge. From the time when the Greeks began 
to cultivate philosophy and to construct systems 
of thought, criticism, as a reaction against the 
dogmatic spirit, made its appearance, and in 
the conflicting theories as to the nature of the 
real as distinguished from the apparent, it found 
the conditions most favorable to its work. 
The primitive attitude of the mind is trust, and 
hence historically as well as logically affirmation 
precedes negation. The antithesis of sense and 
reason is brought forward by Heraclitus and the 
Eleatics in the prc-Socratic epoch. Among the 



AGNOSTICISM. 59 

sophists Protagoras denies the possibility of 
objective truth, and dissolves knowledge into 
momentary individual sensation. With the 
theory of nescience Gorgias combines that of 
intellectual nihilism. Nothing exists, he affirms, 
and if anything existed it would be unknowable. 
Disbelief in the validity of knowledge developed 
into moral skepticism which recognized no good 
but pleasure, no right but might. Pyrrho, who 
gave his name to a school of skepticism, teaches 
that we know nothing of the nature of things, 
and that the wise man, in matters of this kind, 
pronounces no opinion. His followers extended 
their doubt to the principle of doubt itself, and 
thus sought to give to skepticism a universal 
import. Carneades denied that there is a crite- 
rion of truth, for impressions, sensations, per- 
ceptions testify only to themselves, not to the 
nature of the objects by which they are caused. 
They in many cases mislead us, and consequently 
we can never be sure we are not misled. The 
arguments of the ancient skeptics are based on 
the relativity of ideas. We can never know 
things as they are in themselves, but only as 
they appear to us ; and every affirmation con- 
cerning them may be met by its opposite. 

In the writings of some of the early, as well 
as in those of some of the later apologists of 
Christianity, reason is disparaged in a way which 



60 RELIGION', AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

implies a doubt of the validity of knowledge. 
What else can we infer, when Tertullian, for 
instance, says the death of the Son of God is 
credible, because it is absurd ; that his burial 
and resurrection are certain, because impossible? 
And is not Pascal a skeptic, when he declares 
that to mock at philosophy is to be a true phi- 
losopher, and when he calls reason impotent? 

Modern philosophy, and modern science, too, 
properly begin with Descartes. When he ap- 
peared, the efforts of scholasticism to reduce 
the teachings of the Church to a theological 
system, and to demonstrate divine truth by 
rigorous logical deductions, had, as far as this 
is possible, accomplished their work. The ob- 
jective method had had its day: a new spirit 
had come over the Christian nations. It had 
been shown that the earth moves round the 
sun ; institutions and beliefs which had been 
considered as immovable as the earth itself 
were shaken; and principles which had been 
looked upon as the foundation of all proof were 
called in question. In the confusion of religious 
controversies and wars, new doubts had risen, 
new views of life had begun to prevail, and new 
theories had been devised. The appeal to the 
conscience of the individual, as supreme in 
questions of faith, and the denial of the freedom 
of the will, had led to inquiries into the value 



AGNOSTICISM. 6l 

of knowledge. Are we certain of anything, and 
if so, upon what grounds does our certainty 
rest? This is the problem which Descartes 
undertook to solve. His method is critical and 
begins with doubt. His doubt, however, is 
active, and aims to overcome itself. It seeks to 
find a ground of certitude which shall make 
skepticism impossible. To begin, all confess 
that life is full of illusions ; that authority may 
err, testimony be false, memory untrustworthy, 
the evidence of the senses misleading, while 
reason lands us in contradictions. Is it pos- 
sible, then, to be certain of anything? Yes, of 
the fact that we think, feel, doubt. In all the 
processes by which we may seek to establish 
the principle of skepticism, we are still certain 
that we think. In self-consciousness, therefore, 
we have the primal unity of thought and being, 
which is the definition of truth ; and this unity 
is not an inference, but an intuition of the mind. 
But how can mere self-consciousness give us a 
knowledge of what is not ourselves, of an exter- 
nal world which is independent of our percep- 
tion? What we call the properties of matter 
are, as a very little reflection suffices to make 
plain, but modes of consciousness. When we 
say that an object is red or hard or round, all 
that we really mean is that we are conscious of 
the sensation of redness, hardness, roundness. 



62 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

Even the very unity which we ascribe to the 
object is but the form our perception of it 
takes; for every object makes various impres- 
sions, and this manifold of sense is bound into 
unity only in perception. Hence our knowledge 
of things is really only a knowledge of states of 
consciousness. Is it not, then, impossible to 
know that a world external to consciousness 
exists? Descartes answers that we could have 
no certainty of the existence of a real world out- 
side of ourselves, if it were not certain that there 
is a God who cannot deceive us. But God's 
being, he maintains, is involved in the principle 
of causality, which is a self-evident truth. The 
idea of the infinite, the absolute, the perfect, we 
all have ; and the principle of causality makes 
us certain that this idea is not derived from our 
own limited nature. Its origin must therefore be 
sought in a being who actually contains all that 
our idea of him contains. Thus the idea of 
God underlies self-consciousness, and in know- 
ing ourselves we know God. This argument 
has often been impugned, and to defend it is 
not here my purpose. I wish merely to point 
out that what saved Descartes from agnosticism 
concerning the reality of nature was his reasoned 
belief in the existence and veracity of God. 

The method of Locke, like that of Descartes, 
is subjective. He, too, begins with self-con- 



AGNOSTICISM. 63 

sciousness, and finds that it consists in sensation 
and reflection, which are the two fountain-heads 
of all knowledge. Reflection, though it be not 
sense, may not improperly be called internal 
sense. " Since the mind," he says, " in all its 
thoughts and reasonings hath no other immedi- 
ate object but its own ideas which it alone does 
or can contemplate, it is evident that our knowl- 
edge is only conversant about them. Knowl- 
edge, then, seems to me nothing but the per- 
ception of the connection and agreement, or 
disagreement and repugnancy, of any one of 
our ideas." The question of knowledge, there- 
fore, is a question of ideas, and in Locke's opin- 
ion, mere ideas are " neither true nor false, 
being nothing but bare appearances in our 
minds." It is not in the power of the most ex- 
alted wit or the most enlarged understanding to 
form any simple idea which has not been taken 
in through the senses. In proof of this, he 
would have us try to fancy a taste which had 
never affected the palate, or a scent which had 
never been perceived ; and if this is possible, 
he will admit that a man born blind may have 
ideas of color, or one born deaf notions of sound. 
When the mind turns its view inward upon itself, 
it transforms sensation into ideas of thinking 
and willing; of which remembrance, reasoning, 
knowledge, and faith are but modes. How shall 



64 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

the mind, since it perceives nothing but its own 
ideas, know that they agree with the things 
themselves? This is the problem Locke pro- 
poses to himself; and his solution is that simple 
ideas are the necessary product of things oper- 
ating on the mind in a natural way, and pro- 
ducing those perceptions which the wisdom and 
will of our Maker ordained them to produce. 
They are consequently not fictions of our fancy, 
but natural productions of things without, really 
operating upon us, and having with them all the 
conformity which is intended or which our state 
requires. This is evidently an avowal of our in- 
ability to transcend the sphere of consciousness 
and to penetrate into the essence of things. 
We are obliged to suppose substance, but what 
it is we neither know nor can know. There is 
nothing, he holds, contradictory to reason in the 
supposition that our sense-perceptions are il- 
lusory, although we are incapable of doubting 
their reality. Locke, however, is not, or at 
least does not believe himself to be, a skeptic. 
" If I doubt all other things," he says, " that 
very doubt makes me perceive my own exist- 
ence and will not permit me to doubt of that." 
Like Descartes, he is more certain that God 
exists than that the external world is real. " It 
is plain to me," he says, " that we have a more 
certain knowledge of the existence of God than 



AGNOSTICISM, 6$ 

of anything our senses have not immediately 
discovered to us. Nay, I presume I may say 
that we may more certainly know there is a 
God than that there is anything else without 
us." For him as for Descartes God's being is 
involved in the principle of causality. To self- 
consciousness the cause is revealed in its effect. 
The problems suggested by these two great 
philosophers awakened the speculative genius 
of Berkeley. His meditations led him to the 
conclusion that no existence is conceivable or 
possible which is not either conscious spirit or 
the ideas of which such spirit is conscious. 
What we call matter is really a mental concep- 
tion. Mind, therefore, is the deepest reality. 
Externality, in the sense of independence of 
mind, has no meaning. Descartes and Locke 
had looked upon matter as the unperceived back- 
ground of experience, to which our ideas of ex- 
ternal things are to be attributed. As knowledge 
was limited to the ideas thus produced, it could 
not extend to the substance or cause which pro- 
duced them. Hence there could be no rational 
ground for belief in the existence of such a 
cause, and philosophy seemed doomed to end 
in skepticism. In his efforts to avoid such a re- 
sult, Berkeley placed the problem in a new light. 
He asked himself what the ideas of cause, sub- 
stance, and matter really mean, and he found 

5 



66 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

that they are inconceivable, if they are sup- 
posed to represent something which exists 
apart from all knowledge of it. External things, 
as external, cannot enter into consciousness. 
This might seem to be pure idealism, but in 
Berkeley's mind it is essentially connected with 
the theory of causality. Since matter, apart 
from its perception, is inconceivable, and since 
sense ideas are not due to our own activity, 
their cause can be nothing else than the divine 
intelligence and will. This theory does not 
contradict the evidence of the senses. " That 
the things/' says Berkeley, " which I see with 
my eyes and touch with my hands, do exist, 
really exist, I make not the least question. 
The only thing whose existence I deny is that 
which philosophers call matter, corporeal sub- 
stance. " All our knowledge of objects, he con- 
tends, is a knowledge of ideas. The things we 
call objects are really ideas. To the objection 
that though ideas can have no existence save in 
the mind, there may be things outside of mind, 
of which ideas are copies or resemblances, 
Berkeley makes answer that an idea can be like 
nothing but an idea. If these supposed things 
are perceivable, they are ideas; if they cannot 
be perceived it is lack of sense to say that color, 
for instance, can be like something which is in- 
visible, or that hard or soft can be like what is 



AGNOSTICISM. 67 

intangible. For matter, Berkeley substitutes the 
living, ever-active mind of God as the centre 
and source of the universe. Man's irresistible 
longing for knowledge springs from the need 
of bringing his conceptions into harmony with 
the divine thoughts. Things are the letters and 
words of a language which God speaks to the 
soul. Our belief in the permanence of some- 
thing which corresponds to our sensations and 
perceptions is simply belief in the uniformity 
and order of nature, and this is but the assur- 
ance that the universe is informed and regulated 
by mind. 

Locke maintained that all our ideas are de- 
rived through the senses, and Berkeley affirmed 
that the objects of knowledge are never any- 
thing else than ideas. Experience gives us 
thoughts, and we know nothing but our thoughts. 
Hume took up this position and upon it built 
the most complete system of skepticism human 
reason has ever framed. If from ideas we can- 
not infer the existence of matter, then, he 
argued, neither can we from them infer the 
existence of mind. Ideas can give knowledge 
only of ideas. Matter is but a collection of 
impressions. Mind is but a succession of im- 
pressions. Nature forces us to believe in the 
reality of things, but reason is impotent to know 
that they are real. " Thus the skeptic," he 



68 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

says, " still continues to reason and believe, 
even though he asserts he cannot defend his 
reason by reason; and by the same rule he 
must assent to the principle concerning the 
existence of body, though he cannot pretend 
by any arguments of philosophy to defend its 
veracity." 

He divides the contents of the mind into 
impressions and their faint copies, which he 
calls ideas. The primary contents of the mind, 
then, are simply impressions, the origin of which 
we cannot know. As all impressions are strictly 
individual, it follows that all ideas are strictly 
particular. We are conscious only of isolated 
states, each of which is related to other states 
in a merely external way. Real knowledge 
implies the passing from a present impression 
to something connected with it, and this some- 
thing, as it is not itself present, is represented 
by its copy or idea. The connecting link 
between an impression and an idea is what we 
mean by cause. But since all our impressions 
and ideas are particular and isolated states, it 
is impossible to establish an internal connection 
between them. As every impression is a con- 
tingent fact, which might not be or might be 
other than it is, there can be no necessary or 
causal relation between the facts of experience. 
The idea of cause is merely that of conjunction 



AGNOSTICISM. 69 

or sequence. When certain impressions and 
ideas are uniformly followed by other impres- 
sions and ideas, we imagine a causal connection 
between them. The subjective transition, rest- 
ing upon past experience, is mistaken for an 
objective relation. Since, according to Hume, 
it is impossible to know that there is either a 
subject or an object, it necessarily follows that 
no real connection between states of conscious- 
ness can be established. In what hopeless 
confusion this theory of cognition ends, Hume 
himself has pointed out. If perceptions form 
a whole and become the groundwork of knowl- 
edge only when they are connected, and if no 
connection between them is discoverable by 
the human understanding, the inevitable out- 
come is that we can know nothing. " All my 
hopes vanish, " he says, " when I come to ex- 
plain the principles that unite our successive 
perceptions in our thought or consciousness. I 
cannot discover any theory which gives me 
satisfaction on this head. In short, there are 
two principles which I cannot render consistent, 
nor is it in my power to renounce either of 
them, viz. : that all our distinct perceptions are 
distinct existences, and, that the mind never 
perceives any real connection among distinct 
existences. " 

Since the time of Descartes, there has been 



7<3 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

a general agreement among thinkers that 
philosophy must necessarily begin with self- 
consciousness. The criticism of the data of 
consciousness, as made by Hume, ended in 
hopeless skepticism, in intellectual nihilism. 
We are conscious only of isolated impressions 
and their ideal shadows, and to establish an 
inner connection between the different states 
of consciousness is impossible. Not only is 
the real nature of things forever concealed from 
us, but we cannot even know that things really 
exist. To affirm that we know we can know 
nothing is of course a contradiction, but the 
skeptic urges that this is but a confirmation of 
his theory that reason lands us in contradictions 
and is therefore not to be trusted. Both the 
science of mind and the science of nature work 
with images of the understanding to which 
nothing real corresponds. All demonstration 
which is concerned with anything else than 
figures and numbers is worthless sophistry. 
The idea of cause is merely that of accom- 
paniment or of succession. A cause is assumed, 
but the assumption is groundless. The idea 
of substance arises when we are conscious of 
the repeated occurrence of several ideas in the 
same relation towards one another and at the 
same time. We add to these the idea of some- 
thing which sustains them and call it substance, 



AGNOSTICISM. 7 1 

that which stands under impressions. Substance, 
therefore, is a mere figment of the mind. 

The reasoned skepticism of Hume led Kant 
to subject the mental faculties to a new and 
more thorough criticism, and he is the first 
philosopher who fully brought to light the 
necessity of a satisfactory theory of knowledge. 
He undertook his great work with the intention 
of refuting the arguments of the skeptical school ; 
whether or not he succeeded is disputed. The 
mind, he teaches, can think but not know, 
unless the senses supply the materials of knowl- 
edge. Hence his criticism deals with the pre- 
suppositions of knowledge, the conditions which 
make knowledge possible. Sensations are given 
us ; the mind unites the manifold of sense and 
transforms it into perception or idea. The 
content is given, the form is supplied by the 
mind. It gives to all sensations the forms of 
space and time, for the ideas of space and time 
are not received from without, but are wholly 
subjective, the necessary forms of thought 
which lie in us, and according to which we com- 
bine our manifold sensations into unity, which 
constitutes them things, phenomena. Space is 
primarily the form for the outer sense, time for 
the inner. All phenomena, therefore, are tem- 
poral ; those of the external sense are also 
spacial. As time and space are merely con- 



72 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

ditions of perception, they have no validity for 
what is not an object of sensation or for what is 
not phenomenon or appearance, What is not 
phenomenon Kant calls noumenon, or thing-in- 
itself. To the thing-in-itself, time and space 
have no relation. The mind, which gives to 
sense-experience the forms of space and time, 
reduces the data of experience to unity and 
makes it possible to classify objects under the 
categorical heads of quantity, quality, relation, 
and modality. These are the pure forms of the 
understanding which render thought possible. 
By the understanding Kant means the faculty 
of judging. The conceptions it forms are re- 
duced to some general idea by the reason, 
which he calls the faculty of inference. Reason 
has three pure ideas, which are above the 
intuitions of time and space, and above the 
conceptions of the understanding. These are 
the idea of the universe, the idea of the soul, 
and the idea of God. As space and time are 
the forms of sensibility, as the categories of 
quantity, quality, relation, and modality are the 
forms of understanding, so these three ideas 
are the forms of reason. Neither space and 
time, nor the categories, nor the three ideas of 
reason are derived from experience, nor can 
they be resolved into experience, but they arc 
the independent and necessary conditions of 



AGNOSTICISM. 73 

knowledge. They are the fundamental laws of 
the mind, and act, whether we observe them or 
not. They are the first truths, the a priori 
principles which when reduced to system con- 
stitute metaphysics. Cognition begins with 
intuition, proceeds to conception, and ends in 
the ideas of reason. 

The ideas of reason deal with conceptions, 
as the understanding deals with sensations. 
They are not intuitive, but discursive, and 
reason has validity only when it is used within 
the sphere of the understanding. The thing-in- 
itself is unknown and unknowable, for to be 
known it must be invested with the forms of 
space and time and the categories, and then it 
is no longer thing-in-itself, but appearance. 
The existence of an external world is a necessary 
postulate, but it cannot be proven, and con- 
sequently we can never say that our knowledge 
has objective truth. Truth is the agreement of 
thought with thought, not of thought with 
things. The ideas of reason, then, have a merely 
subjective value, and we cannot logically affirm 
that the world, the soul, and God really exist. 
Thus Kant's criticism of pure reason ends in 
skepticism, and he seems not to have under- 
mined, but to have strengthened the position of 
Hume. By no rational process can things pass 
into thought; ideas remain ideas and can never 



74 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

be translated into fact. The only reality for us is 
a reality in consciousness, which is but a phe- 
nomenal and relative reality. How, then, is 
knowledge possible, or how is an object possible, 
since an object is something beyond sensation? 
This is the problem Kant seeks to solve, and he 
has put it in so strong a light that he has caused 
the deeper philosophic thought of the last hun- 
dred years to turn upon the meaning and value 
of knowledge. It is a criticism of mind which 
now tends to become an investigation into the 
physiological conditions upon which thinking 
depends. Kant's solution of the problem is that 
thoughts and things are not diverse. Knowl- 
edge is the result of the interaction of mind and 
matter. Intelligence is present from the first in the 
creation of objects. The universal and necessary 
element in all science springs from the organiz- 
ing unity of mind. Mind imposes its laws upon 
nature and reads into it a rational meaning. 
Kant's great merit is to have shown beyond 
the possibility of doubt that material data can 
never constitute knowledge. Henceforth the 
theories of positivism and materialism are seen 
to be not merely superficial, but absurd. It is 
not possible to attempt to reduce mind to a 
function of matter without supposing mind 
already to exist. The principle of force or 
mechanical causality by which materialists seek 



AGNOSTICISM. 75 

to explain the phenomena of the world is inap- 
plicable to vital phenomena, and therefore utterly 
fails as an explanation of consciousness. It is 
not possible to state the problem except in terms 
of mind ; and since we therefore necessarily start 
with mind, the attempt to reach mind as a result 
of merely material conditions inevitably fails. 
It is to seek in the object of thought that which 
produces thought, in the body which reflects 
light, the source of light. A mechanical equiv- 
alent of consciousness is inconceivable, for in all 
mental phenomena, self is present as opposed 
to and determining the data of sense. When 
therefore consciousness is developed in the 
midst of a material environment, the cause can 
be no other than mind controlling and directing 
matter. 

But the idealism of Kant, which makes the in- 
adequacy of materialistic theories plain, seems 
to favor the theory of nescience, which has be- 
come popular under the name of agnosticism. 
His idea of time and space, and of the categories, 
led him to hold that the objective is not being 
external to consciousness, but conformity to law. 
The pure reason deduces from the understanding, 
not reality, not things in themselves, but laws. 
Nature is simply experience as determined by 
the categories. The world of sense is a lawless 
aggregate; nature is orderly coherence which 



J6 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 



the understanding arranges according to the 
categories; and if the thinking subject were 
taken away nature would also fall away. The 
critical philosophy, like the Copernican astron- 
omy, corrects the impulse to believe that things 
are what they appear to be. The eye sees the 
sun move ; the mind perceives that the sun is 
stationary, and that the earth moves. So the 
eye sees that objects are white or round or hard 
or large ; the touch tells us they are cold or hot, 
smooth or rough ; the ear that they are sound- 
less or resonant; the palate that they are sweet 
or bitter ; but reflection makes it plain that these 
qualities are in ourselves, and not in the objects: 
they are impressions, modes of perceiving, not 
modes of being. This, it is held, is also true of 
time and space, which are not something real in 
which things exist, but forms of thought, condi- 
tions which render experience possible. Thus 
the objective world becomes a world of appear- 
ances, a world relatively to us, not a world in it- 
self. As there is no real likeness between a word 
and the thing it expresses, — the word house, 
for instance, and the building itself, — so the ideas 
of things bear no resemblance to the things 
themselves. Indeed Kant's thing-in-itself is 
assumed, not known, to exist. It is a ghost in 
the reality of which the philosopher does not be- 
lieve. The result of Kant's criticism is seen in 



. 



AGNOSTICISM, J 7 

its further development in the system of Fichte. 
11 I know absolutely nothing,'* he says, " nothing 
of any being, not even of my own. There is no 
being. I know nothing and I am nothing. 
There are figures, appearances, shadows; they 
are the only things which exist; they know 
themselves after the fashion of shadows — fleet- 
ing shadows, flitting over nothing. Shadows of 
shadows and related only to shadows; images 
which resemble nothing, without meaning and 
without purpose. I myself am one of these 
shadows, not a shadow, even, but a confused 
cloud-heap of intermingled shadows. All reality 
is but a dream which has no life for its object, 
no mind for its subject; a dream which holds 
to nothing but a dream. Sight is a dream, and 
thought, the source of the whole substance and 
reality which I elaborate from my being, my 
strength, my destiny, is the dream of a dream. " 
In the thought of Fichte the critical philoso- 
phy led to nihilism; in Schelling, it became 
pantheism, and Schopenhauer found in it the 
proof of pessimism ; but the opinions and beliefs 
of the English-speaking world have not been 
greatly influenced by any of these systems; 
though here as elsewhere among the enlightened 
portion of mankind, the force and significance of 
Kant's criticism have been felt and acknowledged. 
Hamilton, who first interpreted the new philos- 



78 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

ophy to readers of English, holds with Kant 
that we know only the phenomenal ; that of 
which it is phenomenal, remaining unknown 
and unknowable. It follows that we do not 
know things, but only their relations to ourselves 
and to one another. This is the theory of the 
essential relativity of knowledge which Mr. 
Spencer has taken from Hamilton and Mansel, 
and which is the metaphysical principle of his 
synthetic philosophy. The clear and forcible 
style in which he has explained his theory has 
made it popular, and the result is that a multi- 
tude of writers and speakers have taken up the 
" unknowable/' as a catchword, and have made 
it the basis of a creed which they call agnosti- 
cism. 

It is plain from what I have thus far written, 
that this creed is intimately associated with the 
deepest speculations in which the human mind 
has engaged. The problems that it raises are 
fundamental, and to imagine that this is a question 
in which wit or sarcasm can be of any avail is 
to show oneself ignorant of its real import. 

Some of the defenders of agnosticism, as, for 
instance, Mr. Fawcett, the American novelist, 
write on this subject in a style of which neither 
a scholar nor a philosopher can approve. 
u Truly," he says, " the most extraordinary idea 
which ever entered the brain of man is that of a 



AGNOSTICISM. 79 

personal overwatching deity." Again : " If he 
(the agnostic) leans toward absolute atheism, 
he does so because the vast weight of evidence 
impels him in that direction," Like one who 
might have circumnavigated all the worlds of 
thought, Mr. Fawcett affirms " the total insolu- 
bility " of the problems of life and death. Such 
writing is its own condemnation. This knowing- 
ness and this dogmatism is the very last thing to 
which a true agnostic will commit himself. His 
attitude is negative, he neither affirms nor denies 
the existence of God, the soul, and life in the 
unseen world. His profession is that he does 
not and cannot know anything of all this. An 
overweening fondness for outrageous assertion 
is also characteristic of the writings of Mr. Inger- 
soll, who, though he is considered a champion 
of agnosticism, does not hesitate to pronounce 
judgment offhand in matters on which the 
greatest minds, after a lifetime of patient medi- 
tation, speak dispassionately at least and with 
hesitation. The confident assurance of an ama- 
teur is always suspicious ; and to have lived with 
deep and serious minds is to turn instinctively 
from declaimers. 

They who impugn the validity of every pro- 
cess and operation of the intellect cannot be 
refuted by rational arguments, because the 
faculties which alone make refutation possible 



80 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

are themselves called in question. Such skepti- 
cism, however, is meaningless and is thrust aside 
by reason's indestructible trust in itself. The 
doubt of the agnostic is less radical. He believes 
that we can know the phenomenal, and the phe- 
nomenal alone ; that the ultimate origin of all 
things, if there be an ultimate origin, is unknown 
and unknowable ; that God and the soul, if they 
exist, belong to realms where affirmation and 
denial are meaningless. This is but a form of 
Kant's doctrine that the pure reason cannot 
know the real, the thing-in-itself ; it is but a new 
application of the theory of the relativity of 
knowledge, as explained in the writings of 
Hamilton and Mansel. To think, they say, is 
to define, to limit, to place conditions; and 
therefore the " unconditioned/' the infinite and 
absolute, is unthinkable and unknowable. The 
very terms, infinite and absolute, are a negation 
of the conditions which make thought possible. 
This is agnosticism in its essence. It is a meta- 
physical creed, and yet those who accept it have, 
as a rule, no faith in metaphysics. It is not sur- 
prising, however, that it should spread in an age 
like this in which problems take the place of 
principles, in which increasing knowledge brings 
us into ever-widening contact with infinite 
worlds of nescience. In the light of advancing 
science, as in that of faith, we feel that though 



AGNOSTICISM, 8 1 

we may not say we know nothing, it is safe 
to affirm that we know and can know but 
little. There seems to be a kind of religion 
in professing our inability to know the highest 
truth. The avowed aim of Hamilton and Mansel 
was to give new force to the demonstration of 
the need of faith and of a supernatural revela- 
tion, by showing the impotence of reason as the 
organ of religious knowledge ; and Mr. Spencer 
writes with unwonted fervor in defence of his 
theory of the unknowable, in which alone he 
finds the possibility of reconciling religion with 
science. His view of the ultimate cause of all 
things is, in his own opinion, the only religious 
view. It contains, he says, more of true religion 
than all the dogmatic theology ever written. 
His book on Ecclesiastical Institutions closes 
with the following words : " Amid the mysteries 
which become the more mysterious the more 
they are thought about, there will remain the one 
absolute certainty, that he (the most powerful 
and most instructed mind) is ever in presence 
of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which 
all things proceed." 

It is this Infinite and Eternal Energy that 
he calls the unknowable, and yet he affirms that 
he is absolutely certain that he is ever in its 
presence, and that he knows that it is energy, 
infinite and eternal, and that from it all things 

6 



82 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

proceed. That of which so much is known 
cannot be called unknowable. Mr. Spencer 
himself perceives this. " Reality," he says, 
" though not capable of being made a thought, 
properly so called, because not capable of being 
brought within limits, nevertheless remains as a 
consciousness that is positive, is not rendered 
negative by the negation of limits." It is plain, 
in fact, that we may not hold that human intelli- 
gence is limited to the finite, and that it is also 
conscious of an existence beyond the finite. To 
say that our knowledge is relative is to imply 
jtliat we know there is an absolute. To affirm 
that we know only the phenomenal, necessarily 
involves the assumption that we know there is 
something which is not mere appearance, but is 
real. As subject implies an object, so the rela- 
tive implies the absolute, the finite the infinite, 
the apparent the real. When Mr. Spencer 
maintains that the Infinite Reality is unknowa- 
ble, his words seem to be meaningless. The 
unknowable is the non-existent, since intelligi- 
bility is co-extensive with being. His theory 
rests upon a false abstraction. It is an attempt 
to conceive of absolute being, as existing inde- 
pendently of any mind by which it is known to 
be absolute being. He first declares this object 
to be outside of thought, and then proceeds to 
point out the impressions or ideas which it pro- 



AGNOSTICISM. 83 

duces in the mind. The relation of thought to 
reality, of subject to object, of knowing to being, 
is essential; the bond which unites them is 
indissoluble ; we may distinguish between them, 
but we cannot think of one without implying 
at least the existence of the other. The only 
reality of which we can have any conception is 
intelligible reality, and it is precisely this which 
makes it impossible to conceive of the universe 
as proceeding from an irrational cause. We do 
not put thought in things, but find it there, and 
hence we are driven to recognize thought also 
in the Infinite Being, of which the sensible 
world is a manifestation. The history of prog- 
ress is the history of mind seeking and real- 
izing itself in its object. 

The theory which maintains that the absolute 
has no relation to thought, and that it is, never- 
theless, a necessary and ever-present condition 
of thought, is manifestly untenable. It cannot 
be said, even, that we have a more vivid and 
positive consciousness of the finite than of the 
infinite, of the relative than of the absolute, of 
the phenomenal than of the real. Our con- 
sciousness of both is a consciousness relative to 
thought, and involves the mystery which inheres 
in all knowledge. Hence faith is the spontane- 
ous act of the pure reason. Inward inclina- 
tion, more than rational grounds, compels us to 



84 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

believe both in science and religion. The evi- 
dence of the senses themselves is a kind of testi- 
mony which requires the acceptance of faith. 
We have certain primary beliefs which are at 
once irresistible and inexplicable ; certain unde- 
rived ideas which we must accept, or see all our 
knowledge dissolve into chaos. The self-evident 
cannot be proved, for all proof depends ulti- 
mately on the self-evident. He who doubts the 
testimony of the senses cannot be persuaded by 
words which reach him only through the senses. 
To impeach the knowing faculties, because they 
involve relations to what is not themselves, is to 
find fault with the mind because it is not the 
object which it apprehends. It is to seek not to 
know, but to be the things we know. Once we 
recognize that this attempt is vain, agnosticism 
ceases to have any reason for existing. Knowl- 
edge is not and cannot be the thing itself. 
Though our ideas are not the things themselves, 
it does not follow that they are powerless to 
give us a knowledge of things. Things cannot 
be other than the laws of thought make them, 
and hence we may know them as they are. The 
life of sensation and the life of reason both lead 
us to a world which is beyond the senses, and 
which for the intellect is full of mystery. We 
do not know the whole of anything. It does 
not, however, follow that we know nothing, but 



AGNOSTICISM. 85 

it does follow that in all our knowledge there is 
an element of faith which goes beyond the con- 
clusions of the intellect, and which is faith 
precisely because it is not clear knowledge. 
In perceiving the limit of thought, we tran- 
scend that limit and find ourselves in a higher 
and more real world. All true knowledge con- 
tains an element of infinitude, which we cannot 
perfectly grasp, but apart from which the 
whole system of knowledge breaks into frag- 
ments. The thought which is in mind and 
the intelligibility which is in nature are bound 
into organic harmony by the Infinite, who is the 
unity of thought and being ; and the universal 
process which evolves the higher from the lower 
is comprehensible only when we conceive the 
highest energizing within the whole. 

Self-consciousness, if we rightly analyze it, 
involves the existence of a being who embraces 
within his own unity all thought and existence. 
This is the implicit knowledge of God which 
makes belief in Him as natural as belief in 
the reality of nature. To think is to share 
in the universal life of reason, a life whose 
very nature it is to be infinite and eternal; 
and to be an atheist is as irrational as to be 
an absolute skeptic. Hence religion springs 
spontaneously in the human heart and may be 
found, like faith, hope, and love, in the minds 



86 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

of the ignorant, who are unable to give a rea- 
son for their belief: and since its principle is 
not exclusively or predominantly intellectual, its 
power is felt and seen in the affections and 
deeds rather than in the thoughts which it 
inspires. Its essence is found in complete self- 
surrender, in the union of the soul with God, 
which love alone can effect Hence when we 
are devout we are not critical, and when we are 
critical we are not devout. Hence, too, argu- 
ments, such as this in which I am now engaged, 
though they may be serviceable to the cause of 
religion, have little power to make men relig- 
ious. It is a vulgar error, however, to imagine 
that the ultimate problems of knowing and 
being can be discussed even superficially with- 
out the aid of metaphysical conceptions. To 
understand that physical science itself rests 
upon a metaphysical basis, it is sufficient to 
reflect that such terms as matter, force, and 
law, are metaphysical. The impulse of thought 
fatally carries us beyond sense-experience and 
the attempt to confine knowledge to the domain 
of the apparent is vain. Thought, though dis- 
tinguishable, is inseparable from its object, and 
hence we necessarily find a metaphysical ele- 
ment in the material world. The finite mind, 
nature and God, are ideas which belong to one 
system of knowledge. The universe of thought 



AGNOSTICISM. 87 

is a harmony, not a discord. Nature and mind 
do not exist as independent realities. Each is 
related to the other; they cohere in one sys- 
tem ; they form an organic unity, whose bond 
and life-principle is the Infinite Being. Mind 
finds its laws in nature, and nature apart from 
mind would be mere chaos. We can know and 
love ourselves only in what is not ourselves; 
and the merging of our particular self into a 
larger, is the law of progress, making for that 
perfect union with the Best and the Highest, 
which is the end of life. When we surrender to 
the authority of truth or to the command of 
conscience, we give up the less for the greater ; 
the false for the real; and in doing so we are 
conscious that we obey a law which bids us 
aspire to the possession of absolute truth and 
goodness. 

Thus the religious impulse is founded in the 
very nature of man as a rational being. In all 
consciousness there is an implicit knowledge of 
God, and were this not so, thought would be- 
come chaotic. All truth, indeed, is truth rela- 
tive to thought, and this relativity is found in 
the highest as in the lowest truth. This does 
not, however, as Mr. Spencer has clearly shown, 
prevent our having at least a dim knowledge of 
the Absolute and Infinite. Whoever thinks, 
finds that he is in the grasp of something which 



88 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

is not himself, and which is stronger than he is 
and abides while he passes ; and this he will 
worship whether he call it nature or God. The 
difference lies here — he feels that nature, though 
stronger, is lower than himself, but that God is 
both stronger and higher. Mr. Spencer believes 
that the alternative is not between a God who 
thinks and loves and something lower, but rather 
between such a God and something higher. " Is 
it not just possible," he asks, " that there is a 
mode of being as much transcending intelligence 
and will as these transcend mechanical mo- 
tion? " To be higher than intelligence and will, 
the Ultimate Cause must involve intelligence and 
will. The higher subsumes the lower. When 
we say the Eternal is One who knows and loves, 
we utter the highest truth which human knowl- 
edge permits us to affirm ; and we at the same 
time gladly confess that knowledge and love, 
when affirmed of the Infinite, are but symbols 
of a perfection which words are powerless to ex- 
press. If our knowledge of God were adequate, 
faith would not be a primary virtue of religion. 
The objection that such a conception of the 
Divinity is anthropomorphic, is meaningless. 
If we think at all we must think like men, and 
our idea of nature is as anthropomorphic as our 
idea of God. Certainly Mr. Spencer has not 
sought to make God greater than Christians be- 



agxostic: 89 

lieve Him to be. His Unknowable 
have seen, an unre 1 figment of the brain, 

a shadowy background which gives form and 
definiteness to phenomena. To seek to put 
this phantom in the place of the highest real 
and to constitute it an object of faith and venera- 
tion, is an attempt to violate the laws which 
make rational and religious life possibi 

Better " be suckled in a creed out-worn " than 
assume an air of seeming devoutness in the pres- 
ence of a mock reality; better far find God in 
trees and stones, than seek for Him in the thin- 
nest of logical abstractions. To worship the 
<nowable is as impossible as to worship the 
ideal of humanity; and agnosticism, like posi- 
tivism, logically leads to atheism. If all reality 
were unknowable, Fichte's nihilism would be 
the only sensible creed. We can understand 
the man who looks upon himself just as he 
looks on any other fact; who has no theory as 
to the ultimate cause of nature, no belief in 
God. He may strive to make the most of life, 
feeling that at the best it is worthless : he m 
seek for knowledge because knowledge ~ 
him pleasure ; he may work because he hopes 
thereby to save himself from ennui ; he may 
obey the laws of his country because a criminal 
is ridiculous ; he may be kind and considerate 
in his intercourse with his fellow-men because 



9<D RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

gentle words and polite behavior cost little and 
promise much; he may be sober because a 
drunkard is a fool. He may take delight in 
beauty, may have relish in the play of forces 
which are brought into action by the rivalry of 
human passions ; but what he may not do is to 
pretend to feel a thrill of awe in the presence 
of a phantom world. Arguments from the con- 
sequences of his belief the agnostic may re- 
fuse to consider. Truth should be sought for 
itself, and we should bear witness to it, though 
our confession should involve the destruction of 
the world. If a doctrine of despair is the only 
rational faith, it would be some satisfaction at 
least to know that such is the nature of things. 
If it can be proven that the individual lives a 
moment and then wholly dies (and in the pres- 
ence of illimitable time and space, the life of the 
race is hardly longer or more important than 
that of the individual), it were mere weakness 
to refuse to look truth in the face because its 
aspect saddens and drives to despair. If duty 
has no meaning, if freedom is but a name, 
morality a prejudice; if love and aspiration are 
but shadows of the mind's throwing; humanity 
but a bubble and all nature an illusive spectacle ; 
if, in a word, all is a lie, what gain is there in 
seeking to delude ourselves with other lies? I 
find fault with agnostics rather because they 



AGNOSTICISM. 9 1 

refuse to draw the conclusions which their as- 
sumptions involve. Mr. Spencer's talk of a 
religious emotion with which a consciousness 
of the Unknowable fills the mind, is worse than 
cant. ^ What stands out of relation to thought, 
stands out of relation to conscious life in all its 
phases. The Unknowable is the Incredible. 
We can neither love it nor fear it nor believe in 
it. The agnostic's God is a mere phantom, 
which, as Jean Paul says of the atheist, leaves 
him alone in the world, " with a heart empty 
and made desolate by the loss of his creator 
and father. He mourns by the side of the 
huge corpse of nature which no spirit ani- 
mates, as it lingers in the tomb ; and his sorrow 
shall continue to the moment when dissolu- 
tion severs him from this corpse of which he is 
but an atom. The world poses before him like 
an Egyptian sphinx, half buried in sand ; and 
the universe is but a mask, the iron mask of a 
vague eternity." 

The fountain head of the speculative errors of 
the modern age is an imperfect or a wrong view 
of the data of consciousness. If, with Descartes 
and the whole school of idealists, we make mere 
self-certainty the beginning and basis of all 
knowledge, we shall never get beyond a purely 
subjective world; for if consciousness is con- 
fined to impressions and ideas, for the philoso- 



92 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

pher no object can exist. But self-consciousness 
is a consciousness of the not-self, also ; to know 
ourselves as subject, is to know what is not our- 
selves as object. To know ourselves as finite 
and contingent is to have passed beyond the 
realm of the finite and contingent. Our knowl- 
edge is thus a participation in the divine self- 
knowing, it is a knowing with God which is the 
meaning of consciousness and conscience. The 
primary intuition is not of forms and ideas, but 
of being. With the dawn of consciousness we 
recognize that we are, and that we are in a real, 
and not a merely apparent, world. Our ultimate 
idea of both spirit and matter is that of energy, 
and this idea, originating in our consciousness of 
will-power, impels us to conceive of nature as 
a manifestation of absolute will. A thing is 
force manifesting itself in definite ways : God 
is infinite energy, pure act manifesting itself in 
man and in nature. Our knowledge of both is 
a knowledge of their relation to us, which is 
simply to say that subject is not object To 
know the thing-in-itself is to know its relation 
to us ; since whatever is, exists necessarily in re- 
lation to thought. We know God, then, not as 
He is apart from consciousness, but as He is re- 
lated to us, and we cannot imagine even that 
any other kind of knowledge of Him is possible. 
We cannot, in a word, know anything as though 



AGNOSTICISM. 93 

it were not known. We are conscious of the 
reality of the objective world, but only as it is 
related to a thinking subject. To know it in 
any other way would be not to know it. We 
cannot affirm that anything is apparent merely, 
except by contrasting it with what is real, and 
this holds good also of finite and infinite, partic- 
ular and universal, effect and cause. We see 
from the start that both our inner and our outer 
world is real, not illusory: and reflection is 
powerless to destroy our underived faith in the 
truth of this primary intuition. There is, how- 
ever, even in the clearest knowledge an element 
of mystery, and consequently there is a uni- 
versal need of faith. 

The real object of our knowledge is not a 
world of things-in-themselves ; but the system 
of things as it exists for a perfect intelligence. 
Individual experiences are judged by their co- 
herence with experience in general: and expe- 
rience, as a whole, is an ultimate principle, not 
to be judged by reference to anything else. So 
in the sphere of conduct, the love of life is not 
a blind impulse which seeks to realize itself in 
definite objects, but it is a yearning to bring 
oneself into harmony with the intellectual, 
moral, and esthetic order of the universe, and 
finally with the Divine Nature of which the 
visible world is a symbol. Knowledge, like 



94 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

love, is not a conscious external standing in 
the presence of some inconceivable thing-in- 
itself, but it is a living union and communion 
with things in their organic relationship with 
the thinking mind. 

The proofs of God's existence are but an 
analysis of the data of consciousness, a state- 
ment of the transcendence of thought, of the 
inability of the thinker to rest in the finite and 
the contingent; and when we look upon them 
in this light, the objections so frequently urged 
against their conclusiveness, lose their force. 
When we affirm the contingency of the world, 
as a fact of immediate experience, we, by impli- 
cation, affirm the existence of Absolute Being. 
Its transitoriness implies a permanent, its phe- 
nomenal character, an absolute substance. It 
can be seen to be an effect only in the light of 
the idea of cause, and the analysis of the idea 
of causality leads us finally to a First Cause. 
The evanescence and insufficiency of the finite, 
which is the starting-point of religion, would 
make no impression on us, if we had not 
at least a latent consciousness of the Infinite. 
That there is no good more solid than the 
gilded clouds, more lasting than the vernal 
flowers, is a plaint, which, rising in the heart 
of man and resounding through all literature 
as the note of its most inspired and pathetic 



AGNOSTICISM. 95 

utterances, were meaningless were not human 
life enrooted in the Eternal. The feeling of the 
illusiveness of the world comes from the pres- 
ence in the mind of the idea of God. He is 
thus made known to us as the real, the perma- 
nent, the eternal, who, while the many pass, 
abides. If we were wholly finite, we could not 
be conscious of the fact, and if there were not 
in us a godlike principle, the vanity of all 
things would be hidden from us. However 
difficult it may be to give to thoughts like 
these a satisfactory syllogistic form, they re- 
main forever as a determining cause of our 
belief, and he who fully understands their force 
and meaning must perceive that religion is as 
indestructible as human nature. 

Again, we know, as a fact of immediate experi- 
ence, the intelligibility of the world. We find 
that thoughts and things are co-ordinate. Ideas 
have their counterparts in facts. Everywhere 
there is law and order. In the vegetable and 
animal organism we discover a power at work 
which builds its own habitation and builds it 
in definite ways, a something which, though 
unconscious, does its work with cunning and 
forethought. In the minute cell there is the 
potency which creates the most perfect form. 
And, if it could be proven that the infinite 
variety of nature is but the result of the mani- 



96 RELIGION, AGNOSTICJSM, EDUCATION. 

fold evolution of a single elementary substance, 
we should still inevitably see the work of reason 
in it all. Hence when we know the world as an 
effect, we necessarily think of its Cause as hav- 
ing knowledge and wisdom ; though the knowl- 
edge and wisdom of the Infinite are doubtless 
something inconceivably higher than what these 
terms can mean for us. And we can therefore 
readily believe that the antinomies of reason and 
the dark mysteries of moral life find their solu- 
tion in that Highest Self-Consciousness, in 
which thought and being are one. As the 
laws of the mind are the expression of the Di- 
vine Intelligence, the laws of the conscience 
are the expression of the Divine Will: for 
though a syllogism to prove God's existence, 
with the fact of conscience as its major, may 
be found to halt, yet a true analysis of the 
meaning of conscience shows that it involves 
the recognition of a Supreme Living Power, 
toward whom man stands in the relation of a 
free and responsible agent It is to the testi- 
mony of conscience, to the Categorical Impera- 
tive, founded on the judgment of the practical 
reason, that Kant trusted to deliver us from 
the illusions and contradictions of the specu- 
lative reason, and though his criticism of the 
pure reason, if applied rigidly to the practical 
reason, might have cut the ground from under 



AGNOSTICISM. 97 

his feet, he nevertheless held fast to belief in God, 
in moral freedom, and in immortality, as prin- 
ciples of the spiritual life and deep-laid realities 
beyond the challenge of the critical intellect. 

The inference from the idea to the reality 
involves a paralogism; and if the ontological 
argument of St. Anselm and Descartes is to 
be taken in this sense, it is certainly inconclu- 
sive. But if we examine our consciousness of 
the infinite and eternal, we find that it is more 
than a bare idea. The individual is not con- 
scious of himself merely as an individual, but 
he knows himself as belonging to a world which 
is related to thought. He thinks as a partici- 
pator in the Universal Reason, in the light of 
which all things are seen to be bound together 
in intellectual harmony. He perceives the work- 
ings of a thought higher than his own, and since 
thought implies a thinker, he necessarily infers 
the existence of a supreme mind. In other 
words, individual self-consciousness involves a 
universal self-consciousness, an Absolute Mind, 
who reveals Himself in the conscious life of finite 
minds. In the light of Absolute Spirit we per- 
ceive that the world and man have a being of 
their own, for they are the reality whereby God 
manifests Himself: and we also understand that 
they do not limit His infinity, because to reveal 
Him is their very essence. 

7 



98 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

The objection of Mr. Spencer, Matthew 
Arnold, and other agnostics, that personality- 
is limitation, and consequently that it is a de- 
lusion to suppose that " God is a person who 
thinks and loves," and that the most we can 
say is that He is " the Unknowable Power be- 
hind phenomena," or " the Stream of Tendency 
by which all things fulfil the law of their be- 
ing," or " the eternal not-ourselves which makes 
for righteousness," seems indeed to be formi- 
dable. We have, as we have already seen, no 
adequate conception of anything, for the merest 
atom adheres in a universal system, and can be 
understood only as an effect of an infinite and 
therefore imperfectly known cause. Since our 
knowledge is a knowledge of things in their 
relations to a thinking subject, it can never 
be absolute, and hence whatever we predicate 
of the Supreme Being is predicated analogi- 
cally. He is more than we can know; more, 
therefore, than we can express. To say, as Mr. 
Spencer says, that the Absolute is a power, 
that He acts, is to impose limits upon the 
infinite; and when we affirm that He thinks 
and loves we merely affirm that He acts in the 
highest way conceivable by us. The ideas of 
" stream " and " tendency" manifestly involve 
limitation, while they seem to be a negation of 
thought and will. When some philosopher shall 



AGNOSTICISM. 99 

discover for us a mode of existence higher than 
that of thinking and loving, we shall listen with 
profound interest to what he may have to say; 
but, in the meanwhile when we teach that " God 
is a person who thinks and loves," the Infinite, 
in whom thought and love and being are one, 
we utter the highest and the divinest truth 
known to man. This was the faith of the 
greatest and most enlightened minds of the 
ancient world, and this is the faith that lies 
at the root of modern life and civilization. 
It is hope and joy and strength and light. It 
sheds gladness through the earth. It is the 
wisdom of the unlearned, the courage of the 
timid, the breath of life of those who die. It 
is the keen mountain air of those who love lib- 
erty and truth ; it is the compass of the soul ; 
it is an echo of a voice from unseen worlds, 
filling us with a divine discontent until we 
reach the Eternal, with whom is repose and 
peace. 

" Here then we rest, not fearing for our creed 
The worst that human reasoning can achieve 
To unsettle or perplex it ; yet with pain 
Acknowledging and grievous self-reproach 
That though immovably convinced, we want 
Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith 
As soldiers live by courage ; as by strength 
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas. 
Alas ! the endowment of immortal power 
; LofC. 



100 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

Is matched unequally with custom, time, 

And domineering faculties of sense, 

In all; in most with superadded foes, 

Idle temptations ; open vanities. 

Ephemeral offspring of the unblushing world." 



III. 

AGNOSTICISM — {continued). 

O brother, 'mid far sands, 
The palm-tree-cinctured city stands, 
Bright white beneath, as heaven, bright blue 
Leans o'er it, while the years pursue 
Their course, unable to abate 
Its paradisal laugh at fate. 

— Browning. 

THE tendency of philosophie speculation, 
since Kant, is largely toward agnosticism 
and intellectual nihilism. It is maintained that 
we cannot know what anything is, for the reason 
that we know and can know only our impres- 
sions ; whether they have a cause or what that 
cause is we cannot know. In all perception we 
perceive merely a condition of ourselves ; and all 
knowledge therefore is a knowledge of ourselves. 
Nor can we know this self, even, for we are con- 
scious only of its transitory moods and affections. 
We do not, in fact, know that we know: we 
merely believe that we know. We do not know 
that things really are, but we suppose them to 
be. Truth, therefore, is not a harmony of ideas 
with things, but a correspondence of thought 



102 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

with thought. The critical philosophy, in deny- 
ing the validity of inference from the subjective 
to the objective, denies that knowledge has any 
real value. We are forever shut up within our 
own self-consciousness, impotent to know 
whether there is an external world or whether 
we ourselves are anything. This criticism of 
knowledge, so far as it affects our views of the 
material universe, is simply ignored as senseless 
hair-splitting; but when it is applied to the 
spiritual universe, to God and the soul, many 
take it seriously and doubt whether it is not 
destructive of the very foundations of religious 
belief. It is impossible to persuade them that 
they do not know what matter is, but they 
accept, without much hesitation, a system 
of hopeless nescience as to everything which 
deeply and everlastingly interests the human 
mind and heart. They are ready to believe that 
criticism shatters all the priceless things to 
which men have clung — " The idols of meta- 
physics and the idols of religion, the idols of 
the imagination and the idols of history ; " that 
it makes everything a lie : truth, honor, and jus- 
tice, hope, faith, and love, freedom, duty, and 
conscience. Much of the current scientific spec- 
ulation leads in the same direction. It assumes 
that matter alone is real; that the power behind 
and within all phenomena is simply the unknow- 



A GNOSTICISM. 1 03 

able, that is, the non-existent, since intelligibility 
is co-extensive with being ; that there is nothing 
but force and motion; that the universe is a 
machine which runs itself — it is, and the hy- 
pothesis of God is not needed to explain either 
'its existence or its operation. According to 
this school, force and motion and their modifi- 
cations are the sum and substance of all reality; 
hence human action is controlled by the same 
physical laws which keep the stars in the 
heavens, and a noble thought or a generous 
emotion is not more admirable or more praise- 
worthy than the feats of an acrobat. " The 
worst man/' says Nietzsche, " is perhaps the 
best; for he is indispensable to the keeping 
alive of instincts and tendencies without which 
mankind had long since fallen into lethargy and 
decay. Hate, envy, ambition, and whatever 
else is called wicked, preserve the race, how- 
ever prodigal and foolish the means. Whatever, 
in fact, man may do or omit, he is probably a 
benefactor of the race." As knowledge is 
meaningless, virtue is worthless. Necessity is 
the only God, and unreason is deified. In such 
a world life's true worth is lost. They who no 
longer have the power to believe in the living, 
loving God, lose faith in themselves. The only 
real thing left to them is matter, and possession 
is the supreme good : money and self-indulgence 



104 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

are the highest aims. Apart from this, they are 
mere mental vagrants, who drift idly among all 
the great and vital problems. They are, indeed, 
still haunted by the Unseen, and hence it pleases 
them to listen to those who pass with an irrev- 
erent and mocking spirit, through the sanctities 
and infinities, from which the noblest minds and 
hearts have drawn hope and strength. In 
matters of the best and highest, the absolute 
and eternally real, they have neither faith nor 
knowledge ; but, at the most, some sort of opin- 
ions, which they hold lightly, as being, in all 
probability, neither truer nor falser than innum- 
erable other opinions which have been and yet 
shall be current. The existence of God, the 
reality of the self, the intimations of consciences 
are interesting as questions of debate, as stimu- 
lants of thought, but not as subjects about which 
it is possible to know anything with certainty. 
They incline to believe that God is only a con- 
cept, an abstraction, just as truth, honor, duty, 
love, goodness, mercy, justice, science, progress 
are abstractions. Thus the divine and infinite 
becomes for them a world of shadows. Their 
highest aim is to transform matter in every way. 
They think it a godlike thing to move rapidly, 
to live in splendid houses, to eat delicious food, 
to dwell in populous cities, to possess millions 
of money. They strive for a state of things in 



A GNOS TIC ISM. 1 05 

which they imagine happiness may be found: 
not understanding that happiness or blessedness, 
does not consist in any possible static condition, 
in the possession of any conceivable thing, but 
in a ceaseless striving for the best, for truth and 
love. Righteousness, not abundance, is life. 
Fine clothes do not make the body strong and 
healthy ; rich possessions do not make the soul 
great and free. The highest type of man, says 
Aristotle, finds his pleasures in the noblest 
things. Of such things money can never be the 
symbol or equivalent. It is a means, not an end. 
As thought and love unfold, we perceive that 
they are more precious than all else ; and thus 
we are led to understand that personal worth is 
the measure of all worth. What our Lord said 
of the Sabbath is true of all things. They are 
for man, not man for them. They are good 
and useful because they are helps to right 
human life. Man is made for truth and love, 
the avenues that lead to God, and the measure 
of the worth of all institutions, political, educa- 
tional, and religious, is their power to bring men 
to the knowledge of truth and the practice of 
love. This is the measure of the value of every 
kind of human labor, the principle underlying 
all our social problems. The best climate, even, 
is not that in which we are most comfortable, 
but that which is most favorable to the exer- 



106 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

rise of our noblest faculties ; and the laborer is 
most fortunate not where he receives the highest 
pay, but where his work contributes most effec- 
tively to the development of character. Faith 
itself is not final ; it is a means, not an end. 
When it is superseded by knowledge there is 
gain, not loss. Knowledge and love are final, 
because they are the highest conceivable modes 
of union with the eternal and infinite. 

The misery of our age is the consciousness 
that what we live for is not God's truth, and 
that what it is easiest to turn to is still less His 
truth. We live without hope, not knowing, 
in the universal whirl, what to choose. We 
know that our way of life is not the best, that 
the things we chiefly desire are more or less 
worthless, and that we desire them only because 
we ourselves are poor and miserable. But this 
insight is looked upon with suspicion ; we turn 
from it as from an evil suggestion, and plunge 
again into the world of appearance and show; 
for we have neither a mind nor a heart to know 
and love God's real world of truth and good- 
ness. Those who have lost faith in God have 
no faith in ideals. But idealism is conscien- 
tiousness, and an age which does not believe in 
ideals is fatally driven to seek money and indul- 
gence as the highest good. Hence our one 
virtue is thrift. The thrifty succeed; they gain 



AGNOSTICISM. \OJ 

wealth and honor. What matter if they make 
themselves unintelligent and incapable of the 
rational enjoyment of life? The free life of God, 
says Aristotle, is such as are our brief best 
moments. Hence the end of life is the high 
and free enjoyment of the faculties which make 
us human, and the chief end of labor is to fit 
us for a noble repose and leisure in which the 
soul may play at ease amid the realms of truth, 
goodness, and beauty. How far above us, with 
our inner poverty and vulgar show, our knowl- 
edge not for itself, but for politics and trade, 
this pagan philosopher rises, sitting there where 
we dare not soar ! To men who are not serious 
students, who are not seeking after truth, to 
whom hunger and thirst for righteousness is 
meaningless verbiage, who, having lost faith in 
the reality of the whole spiritual world, hang 
helpless in the network of material aims and 
desires, a frivolous and mocking critic and de- 
molisher, like Colonel Ingersoll, comes with a 
charm and persuasiveness equal to that of poets 
and orators. When we deliberately walk in 
lower ways it is pleasant to think that no man 
knows whether there be higher. After hearing 
him, they say to themselves : " No one can 
know anything of God, the soul, freedom of the 
will, and human responsibility. The only thing 
we are certain of, is that we see and taste and 



108 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

touch. Let us get money and enjoy ourselves/' 
In humoring their religious doubt and indiffer- 
ence, he helps to confirm them in philistinism 
and secularism. In losing faith in God and in 
their own godlike nature, they lose the mightiest 
impulse to high and heroic life. " An immense 
moral, and probably intellectual degeneration,'' 
says Renan, in his latest book, " would follow 
the disappearance of religion from the world. 
You can get much less from a humanity which 
disbelieves in the immortality of the soul than 
from one which believes." Everything depends 
on what we really believe and love. He who 
prefers alcohol to honor and duty is what this 
preference makes him. An infinite faith and 
hope have lived and still live in the world. 
These have been and are the wings whereon 
men have risen toward the highest and the 
best. To persuade them that their divinest and 
holiest thoughts and moods spring from mere 
delusion is to discourage and degrade them. 
The soul believes that it lives in God and with 
God. To destroy this belief and to make it 
feel that it is wedded only to matter, to what is 
beneath it, is to sadden and bewilder, to drive 
it forth from its true home into a desert where 
it can commune only with the senseless wilder- 
ness and beasts of prey. The union of the 
higher with the lower produces the lower. The 



AGNOSTICISM. IO9 

mulatto, the octoroon, even, is still a negro. He 
who would help men must help them to believe 
that the beginning and end of all things is life, 
not matter. Of the dead as utterly separate 
from the living we can have no conception, 
for by the very law of our being, we associate 
matter with sensation, and sensation with life. 
Life, then, is within and around, beneath and 
above all things. Our notions of matter are all 
permeated with thought and feeling, conse- 
quently with life. Force, size, hardness, and 
whatever other ideas enter into our views of the 
material world, have meaning only when blended 
with what lives and thinks. Nature is instinct 
with mind, and if there were no Supreme Mind 
there would be no universe. In the universe, 
there is a tendency from chaos to cosmos, from 
the dead to the live, from the outward to the 
inward, and this movement is Nature's revela- 
tion of God. Life, conscious of itself, is aware 
of its own immortality, for the highest con- 
sciousness is of that which, like truth and love, 
is eternal. 

Whoever seeks to persuade men to lower views 
of life is a frivolous thinker, and his influence 
is fatally immoral. Only a great moral purpose 
can sustain a great soul, and a great moral 
purpose rests finally on faith in God. If there 
is no God, all that is is meaningless and vain. 



HO RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

If He is, I fear no evil ; if He is not, I hope for 
no good. Plato's precept is, learn to die; 
Spinoza's, learn to live ; Christ's, learn to know 
God. Death shows the vanity of life : true life 
shows the impotence of death to do hurt to 
those who love God. He reveals Himself within 
the will of man as within his mind. We cannot 
even desire that anything but the Infinite Best 
should satisfy us, and if we acted with full con- 
sciousness, we should understand that in all 
things we pursue, we seek God, however blindly: 
we should know that we can be made blessed, 
not by the possession of anything, not even by a 
virtuous condition of soul, but only by the living 
view of God's presence in the world. Whatever 
state we attain to we value as a means to some- 
thing better. Shall we not, then, at last reach 
the best? Or shall we believe that life is but a 
sickly dream? It is God who whispers within 
the human conscience, which is but a phase of 
consciousness ; it is He who puts morality in the 
nature of things ; who makes a high and honor- 
able mode of life, followed with perseverance, 
become, in time, a pleasant kind of life ; while 
the immoral pursuit of power, or pleasure, or 
money leads to misery. It is He who causes 
noble and virtuous sentiments to give delight 
and courage to those by whom they are gen- 
uinely felt, whereas, low passions make wretches 



AGNOSTICISM. Ill 

and cowards. It is He who makes virtue self- 
preservative ; vice self-destructive. 

If the eye were not sunlike, how could it 
behold the light? If the soul were not godlike, 
why should it forever yearn for God, seeking 
Him behind all that it follows and loves? Our 
highest aspirations reveal our deepest needs. 
Religion, then, is the greatest and holiest within 
us. " The thing a man does practically be- 
lieve," says Carlyle; " the thing a man does 
practically lay to heart, and know for certain 
concerning his vital relations to this mysterious 
universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is 
in all cases the primary thing for him, and 
creatively determines all the rest." To believe 
in God, which in the past has been the highest 
wisdom, will in the future also continue to be 
the highest wisdom, though man should fail to 
fathom the mystery of being and to read nature's 
secret ; and as we more and more realize that 
God is highest truth, perfect holiness, and in- 
finite love, we shall evolve, not a new religious 
creed, but new and fairer manifestations of the 
healing, strengthening, and ennobling power of 
religion — of that religion which is embodied 
in the life and teachings of Christ. In the 
midst of all our feeble and bewildering skepti- 
cism, we see more clearly than men have ever 
seen before the hopeless disappointment and 



1 1 2 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION 

disgust which sensual indulgence involves. The 
thing has been analyzed, and we hold our breath. 
The ideals of money and place, the intelligent 
now recognize to be also unsatisfactory; and 
we begin to understand that to be famous, even, 
is to survive only as an impersonal influence, to 
outlive ourselves in something which is not our- 
selves. What remains to us, then, but to be 
Buddhists or Christians, to aim either to cease 
to be, or to live with the Eternal, who is truth 
and love ? I find fault with Colonel Ingersoll, 
not because his faith and opinions are not mine, 
but because he approaches the most vital and 
sacred subjects which the mind of man can con- 
sider, in a frivolous and mocking spirit ; because 
he discusses the most momentous and solemn 
of all questions without reverence, which is the 
highest feeling known to man. " Look for a 
people entirely destitute of religion," says Hume, 
" and if you find them at all, be assured they 
are but a few degrees removed from brutes." 
This is the testimony of the most skeptical 
mind whose thought has found a permanent 
place in literature. Religion of some kind in- 
terpenetrates all thought, love, and aspiration ; 
is part of all human nobleness and excellence, 
of all struggles for truth and justice, of all solace 
in wretchedness, of all hope in the presence of 
death ; hence it follows that to combat it, in its 



AGNOSTICISM. 113 

highest form, with shameless assertion, sarcasm, 
and ridicule, is to sin against human nature it- 
self. " Ridicule is," to quote Carlyle again, 
11 intrinsically a small faculty. It is directly 
opposed to thought, to knowledge, properly 
so called ; its nourishment and essence is denial, 
which hovers only on the surface, while knowl- 
edge dwells far below. Moreover, it is by nature 
selfish and morally trivial ; it cherishes nothing 
but our vanity, which may in general be left 
safely enough to shift for itself. ... It is not 
by derision or denial, but by far deeper, more 
earnest, diviner means, that aught truly great 
has been effected for mankind ; that the fabric 
of man's life has been reared, through long cen- 
turies, to its present height." As it takes a hero 
to understand a hero, a poet to love a poet, so 
only a reverent and religious mind can rightly 
deal with questions of religion. We are offended 
less by what Colonel Ingersoll says than by the 
spirit in which it is said. Marcus Aurelius, in 
the midst of dissolving paganism, is bewildered. 
He does not attempt to conceal his doubts as to 
whether there are gods ; but he is always serious 
and earnest, and hence his thoughts are precious 
to all who think and feel, whatever their faith or 
lack of faith may be. We are aware that he is 
a man with men, who treats reverently whatever 
mankind have held to be high and sacred. Soc- 



114 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

rates drank hemlock because he was found guilty 
of blaspheming the gods of Athens; but the 
noble and religious spirit which breathes in all 
his utterances, makes him not only the father 
of philosophy, but the brother of prophets and 
saints. For Voltaire himself, it may be possible 
to find excuse, for he was by nature a persi- 
flcur, a man born to take a light and superficial 
view of all things, and to mock, therefore, at 
himself and mankind. Besides, he lived in an 
age when religion had become associated with 
inveterate and intolerable abuses. And then, 
he had wit and style, and not the mere faculty 
of caricature. 

Fichte, the least orthodox of men, accused 
even of atheism, is always earnest and noble in 
his treatment of religion. What worlds lie be- 
tween Colonel Ingersoll and him, who wrote 
these words : " Even to the end of time all wise 
and reverent men must bow themselves before 
this Jesus of Nazareth ; and the more wise, in- 
telligent, and noble they themselves are, the 
more humbly will they recognize the exceeding 
nobleness of this great and glorious manifesta- 
tion of the Divine Life." Richter, I suppose, 
was not a Christian, but this is what he writes: 
" Christ was the holiest among the mighty, and 
the mightiest among the holy. He lifted, with 
his pierced hands, empires off their hinges; he 



A GNOSTICISM. 1 1 5 

turned the stream of history, and he still 
governs the ages." 

Colonel Ingersoll forgets that religion is not, 
in any proper sense at all, a subject for verbal 
fence, a question to be settled by a debating 
club. It is our very human life, our highest 
aspiration, our deepest need. It is a life to live, 
an attitude toward God and His Universe to be 
ceaselessly held ; and only in a very minor way 
and chiefly for those who have lost the sense of 
its real import, is it a matter for controversy 
and logic-chopping. As the faith of healthful 
minds in the reality of the external world is not 
disturbed by metaphysical theories, so belief in 
God and the soul rides triumphant over the ar- 
guments of materialists and atheists. Difficul- 
ties there are, many and possibly insuperable ; 
but whatever line of thought we take, the mo- 
ment we attempt to descend to the ultimate 
cause and essence of things, reason seems to 
become involved in hopeless contradictions. A 
universal unconscious principle from which all 
things proceed is as incomprehensible as an 
Infinite Being who thinks and loves. The re- 
ligious do not claim that they have a clear view 
of the object of their adoration. Their insistence 
upon the virtue and necessity of faith is evi- 
dence of this. They recognize that what is plain 
is the exception and that mystery is everywhere. 



1 1 6 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION 

In the limitless expanse a few stars twinkle : all 
else is darkness. " There is a chain in the hand 
of God," says von Miiller, " which holds to- 
gether all the beings of the universe, even to 
the smallest grain of sand. Here and there we 
discover its links, but, for the most part, it is 
hidden from our sight." Whatever our solution 
of the enigma of being and of life, we accept it 
on faith. No man can know that the uncon- 
scious can create consciousness. The atheist 
believes in his dogma, as the theist believes in 
God. The one holds that the Infinite Power 
which all dimly discern is mere matter: the 
other is certain that it is life and truth and love 
and beauty. If the atheist ask, How could God 
create such a world ? the theist replies with the 
question : How could matter create a soul which 
thinks and loves, which is nourished by death- 
less hope and uplifted by infinite aspiration? 
To those who affirm that the Almighty is blind 
and senseless, great human hearts will forever 
reply, with their cry of faith, that the infinitely 
strong is also the infinitely wise and good. 
If the materialist were right, those who be- 
lieve in God would still have the better part. 
It is a higher human thing and a mightier to 
trust the larger hope. We cannot but believe 
that the highest is more nearly akin to what in 
us is high than to what in us is low. The ship 



A GNOS TIC ISM. 1 1 7 

,of faith is a Columbus ship. Believers have 
been world-compellers and world-revealers. 
They have conquered with Paul, they have 
founded empires with Charlemagne, they have 
written epics with Dante and Milton, they 
have read the secret of the stars with Coperni- 
cus and Kepler, they have sailed the sea of 
darkness with Columbus, they have cleared the 
wilderness for the people's rule, with the Pur- 
itans. Life's current has welled within them in 
a clear, perennially fresh-flowing stream; and 
they have hugged Death himself, believing that 
he unlocks the door, through which we pass to 
God, by whose throne flows life's full tide. 
They live the life, and the doctrine whereby it 
is expressed is for them nowise uncertain. 
The objector they find to be something of a 
trifler. He is not wholly in earnest about any- 
thing, else he would find less time to argue and 
dispute. This verbalism, after all, settles noth- 
ing that is worth settling. He who tells us what 
difficulties and doubts he has, and what difficul- 
ties and doubts the faith of others suggests to 
him, renders us no real service ; and he is be- 
sides as uninteresting and tiresome to a self- 
active mind as one who complains and laments. 
Let those who seek pretexts for doing nothing 
or doing ill, listen to him; but they who feel 
that life is eternity's seed-time dwell in worlds 



1 1 8 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION. 

where all this phrase-mongering is as unprofit- 
able as the discussions of schoolboys or as a 
politician's zeal for the country's welfare. Why 
should the good and wise care to see a man pull 
even the most wretched thatched hovel about 
the heads of its inmates? Show them how and 
where they may find a nobler dwelling, and they 
will leave the hovel. Be a builder, not a de- 
stroyer ; a creator, not an objector. 

Colonel Ingersoll's method of criticism is one 
which cultivated men have long since thrown 
aside. The critic's function, as scholars now 
hold, is not to point out faults, but to discover 
and make known what is true, excellent, and 
beautiful. What is trivial and hideous any one 
may understand and see, but to learn to know 
and appreciate the best that has been thought 
and said, we all need the instruction and guid- 
ance of those who are wiser and more sensitive 
than ourselves. If he who teaches me a new 
truth, however disagreeable, is my benefactor, 
so is he who helps me to see what is fair and 
true in life and literature ; but he who criticizes 
the Bible — of which Kant said that a single one 
of its lines had consoled him more than all the 
books he had read — in the mood and temper of 
a mocker and coarse humorist, is to me like the 
bull with hay on its horn, mentioned by Horace. 
He is as interesting as Voltaire when he declares 



AGNOSTICISM. 119 

that Shakespeare has not the smallest spark of 
good taste or the smallest acquaintance with the 
rules. Colonel Ingersoll's controversial method 
is as unsatisfactory as is his critical. He is a po- 
lemical guerilla. He does not attempt to lay 
formal siege to the fortress of religious truth, 
but he lies in wait for some sleepy sentinel or 
band of marauders, and when he has fired his 
blunderbuss, chuckles with delight, as though 
he had gained a victory. No well-read man 
will claim that he says anything new. The sig- 
nificance of what he says lies in the emphasis 
with which he says it. Emphasis is bad style. 
It is the attempt to make poverty look like 
riches, to give to platitudes the semblance of 
original thought. His secret is that of the 
rhetorician who, when he has made a thing 
appear ridiculous, would have us believe there 
is nothing more to say. But even those who 
do not think deeply feel, when they have read 
him, that there is infinitely more in the religion 
of Christ than any words of his will ever reveal. 
Sane men will never believe that life is a com- 
edy, a mere freak of nature, and consequently 
they can never be persuaded that religion is a 
delusion. As time lengthens, thought widens ; 
but the larger view does not annul the truth 
there is in the faith of those whose world was 
narrower. To think otherwise is to be a philis- 



120 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

tine ; is to imagine, for instance, that the clas- 
sical languages are dead languages, whereas, in 
truth, they are the living mother tongues of all 
who think and aspire nobly. In them there 
breathes the spirit of our intellectual ancestors, 
of the masters who first showed the world how 
to use the mind ; who gave form and direction 
to philosophy, science, poetry, and eloquence; 
who relive in the idioms of all cultivated 
peoples, and still have a power to develop and 
inspire, which is found neither in the knowledge 
of nature nor in the experience of life. The 
fundamental conception of Christianity is that 
of progress in the knowledge of God and His 
universe. The increasing intelligence of man- 
kind is the gradual revelation of the Divine 
Mind. To deny this is to deny God and rea- 
son. All real progress, indeed, is the growing 
manifestation of the Infinite Being, who lives 
and loves within the whole. He fulfils Himself 
in many ways, and the more we bring all our 
endowments into actuality, the more like unto 
Him do we grow. The lack of the sense for 
historical perspective is Colonel Ingersoll's 
great defect. He projects our modern con- 
sciousness into the past, and finds fault with his 
great-grandfather because he did not know 
what it was impossible for him to know. He is 
like one who should treat Columbus with con- 



AGNOSTICISM. 121 

tempt because he sailed for Cipango, and not 
for America, whose very existence was unknown 
to the Europe of his day. He imagines the 
Copernican system is an argument against in- 
spiration. He assumes that the Bible is a book 
of science, and then points the finger of scorn 
at it because it does not teach the Newtonian 
theories. He throws himself into the primitive 
and barbarous life of the wandering tribes of 
Israel, and is scandalized because their moral 
code is not wholly comparable to that of a 
highly developed and complex social organism 
like our own. There was a time when feudalism 
was a blessing; for us it would be a curse. 
There has been a time when a people could 
save itself only by expelling foreign and un- 
friendly elements; in the modern age this 
may be neither necessary nor desirable. 

Colonel Ingersoll believes in the theory of 
evolution, yet he treats Christianity as though 
development did not exist. He makes humani- 
tarianism the supreme and only saving truth, 
and refuses to recognize the fact that the Chris- 
tian religion has created the conditions that 
have made such faith possible. He exalts the 
worth of woman, yet fails to see that the power 
that made her man's equal before God thereby 
set her feet in the way of larger and nobler life. 
He extols freedom, but forgets that the germ of 



122 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

our modern liberties lies in the apostolic appeal 
from man to God, from emperors and mobs to 
conscience, issuing in that separation of the 
spiritual and temporal powers, which distin- 
guishes Christian civilization from all other, 
He is eloquent in the praise of true marriage 
and of homes consecrated by the heart's devo- 
tion, yet he has only words of scorn for the 
Church, which has ever set its face against 
polygamy, and has fostered with ceaseless care 
the virtue of chastity, which is the mother of 
pure love, and a woman's crown. He is filled 
with horror at the thought of wars and mas- 
sacres in which religious passions have played a 
part, but he has no words of commendation for 
the army of Christian men and women who in 
every age have walked in the ways of peace, 
have quelled strife, have spread good-will, have 
redeemed captives, have watched by the death- 
beds of the forsaken, have moved like minister- 
ing angels in the midst of the victims of pesti- 
lence and famine, have stooped to breathe 
words of hope into the ears of the most aban- 
doned criminals. The only immedicable ill, says 
George Eliot, is that which falls upon a mind 
debased. But Christ has taught us that the 
disease even of a degraded nature is medicable, 
that the germ of the divine life is never wholly 
extinguished even in the most perverted soul. 






AGNOSTICISM. 1 23 

I have reason to believe that Colonel Inger- 
soll is a generous and kind-hearted man. Let 
him turn from persecutions and inquisitions, 
from total depravity and infant damnation, since 
nothing of this is, in any true sense, Christianity, 
to the religion of infinite hope and love, of gen- 
tleness and peace, of mercy and forgiveness, of 
purity and perfectness through suffering, which 
the Blessed Saviour taught. Let him think of 
that charity which enters the darkest recesses 
of vice and misery to bring light and healing, 
which weakens the barriers that separate class 
from class and nation from nation, which carries 
into war itself the spirit of pity and humanity. 
Let him think of the tender thought which 
watches over childhood even in the mother's 
womb, which has made every true man and every 
good woman the lovers and helpers of the little 
ones, those who keep the world young and fresh, 
whom Christ took into his arms and blessed, of 
whom he said that their angels see God's face in 
heaven. Let him think of that wide sympathy 
which embraces all tribes and peoples, all ages 
and conditions ; which while it seems to concern 
only the perfection of individual man, becomes 
the vital principle of civilization, giving new 
meaning to life, new strength to morality, new 
vigor to the nations ; which introduces into his- 
tory a higher conception of God and of man, 



124 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and of man's duty to God and to his fellow-man, 
issuing in a purer and nobler worship, and 
slowly flowering into the fuller consciousness 
of the brotherhood of the whole race, into 
which the spirit of nationalism shall at length, 
as generous hearts believe, be absorbed. This 
religion of Christ has conquered where phi- 
losophies have failed ; it has ennobled where 
arts have degraded ; it has wrought for larger 
and purer life where republics have perished 
in sensuality and lawlessness. Its chronic 
vigor is so indefectible that the very diseases 
which find a nidus in its constitution seem to 
grow immortal. 

" We understand ourselves to be risking no 
new assertion, " says Carlyle, " but simply report- 
ing what is already the conviction of the great- 
est of our age, when we say — that cheerfully 
recognizing, gratefully appropriating whatever 
Voltaire has proved or any other man has 
proved or shall prove, the Christian religion, 
once here, cannot again pass away : that, in one 
or the other form, it will endure through all 
time ; that, as in scripture, so also in the heart 
of man is written, ' The gates of Hell shall not 
prevail against it/ ... It was a height to 
which the human species were fated and 
enabled to attain ; and from which having once 
attained it, they can never retrograde/' 



AGNOSTICISM. 1 25 

The world, indeed, is still far from the per- 
fect knowledge and love of the Divine Life, 
which is revealed in Christ. We are all still 
misled by error and passion ; but when we look 
back we see that progress has been made. 
In the spiritual as in the material world, great 
and far-reaching changes take place in long 
lapses of time. The enthusiast expects to ac- 
complish in a generation what God takes cen- 
turies to bring about; he lacks insight. The 
wise will learn patience and look less to what 
makes an immediate impression than to what 
leads to truth and permanent results. The im- 
portant thing is to keep clear within the mind 
and the conscience true distinctions between 
right and wrong. We readily admit that un- 
truthfulness, cruelty, and dishonesty are vices, 
but we are slow to believe in the guilt of the 
indifferent and unbelieving. It is the fashion, 
even, to make doubt a virtue as though one 
could have the right to rest unresolved where 
vital interests are at stake, as though we did not 
live in a world where faith alone makes action 
possible. 

" Belief or unbelief 
Bears upon life, determines its whole course." 



IV. 

GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION— A REPLY 
TO COLONEL INGERSOLL. 

' I ^HE founders of the colonies from which 
-*- the United States has sprung were deeply- 
religious. Their faith was the chief motive 
which impelled them toward the New World, as 
religious zeal had led Columbus to his discovery. 
When the War of Independence broke forth, 
the descendants of the original settlers were still 
believers in God and Christ, as their fathers had 
been. To represent them as skeptical and irre- 
ligious is a perversion of the truth of history. 
And this is what Colonel Ingersoll has done in 
the article to which I have been asked to write 
a reply. In declaring that " All governments 
derive their just powers from the consent of the 
governed/' they certainly did not believe they 
were " guilty of an act of pure blasphemy — a 
renunciation of the Deity." They were not dc- 
claimers and had no thought of making " a dec- 
laration of the independence of the earth/' 
which would have been false and foolish both 
from a scientific and a rhetorical point of view. 
In making this simple declaration, our fathers 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. \2*J 

did not dream that they thereby " politically 
tore down every altar, and denied the authority 
of every sacred book, and appealed from the 
providence of God to the providence of man/' 
They were not critics, but creators; not de- 
stroyers, but builders ; and for them the provi- 
dence of man was but a phase of the providence 
of God. Their world view did not permit them 
to think that man makes the sun shine, the rain 
fall, the wind blow; gives to earth its double 
motion, and drives the innumerable stars like a 
flock of birds through the limitless expanse of 
the heavens. They were aware that there was 
nothing new or startling in the declaration of 
rights. How could a revelation of high import 
leap forth from a convention or congress ? They 
who argue and debate lose sight of the benign 
face of Truth, visible to some quiet thinker in 
the pleasant solitude of delightful study. From 
the time of Aristotle, philosophers and theolo- 
gians had taught that man is by nature a social 
and political animal, and consequently that he 
has natural social and political rights. St. 
Thomas, more than six hundred years ago, held 
that dominion or supremacy is introduced by 
virtue of human law, and Cardinal Bellarmin, 
who lived in the sixteenth century, took great 
pains to show that power resides as in its sub- 
ject in the whole people, and that they trans- 



128 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

fer this power to one person or more by natural 
law. Here we have the principle that govern- 
ment derives its just powers from the consent of 
the governed. In affirming this truth our 
fathers could have had no thought of denying 
God since they held that from Him man derives 
his being and therefore his natural rights. For 
them, as for the American people to-day, all 
that we are and all that we can hope to be 
comes from the Infinite Being in whom we 
live and move and have our being. This was 
the faith of the framers of the Constitution. 
They were wise and practical men who were 
brought face to face with what seemed to be 
almost insuperable difficulties. The Union 
under the Articles of Confederation was hardly 
more than nominal. Disruption and bankruptcy 
threatened the Government. Antagonisms of 
various kinds prevented the States from coalesc- 
ing into an organic whole. The question of 
slavery divided the North and the South; the 
smaller States were jealous of the larger States ; 
religious disagreements and prejudices gave to 
different parts of the country a distinctive char- 
acter, and the introduction of the question of 
religion would not only have brought discord 
into the convention but would have engendered 
strife throughout the land. 

There were not only grave misgivings con- 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 1 29 

cerning the ability of the delegates to agree 
among themselves, but there were even stronger 
doubts, whether, should they succeed in draw- 
ing up a constitution, it would be ratified by a 
sufficient number of States to make it binding. 
If their work failed, they clearly perceived that 
war, involving ruin and the loss of liberty, would 
be the result. In the presence of such danger, 
like wise men and patriots, they as far as pos- 
sible avoided irritating subjects, and set them- 
selves to work " to form a more perfect union, 
establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, 
provide for the common defence, promote the 
general welfare, and secure the blessings of 
liberty.'' It was prudence, then, and not skep- 
ticism, which induced them to leave the ques- 
tion of religion to the several States, and which 
led to the first constitutional amendment, tak- 
ing from Congress the power to make laws 
" respecting the establishment of religion or 
prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This 
amendment was made not for the destruction 
but for the protection of religion, by men who 
believed that religion, which alone gives to the 
moral character the glow of enthusiasm and the 
strength of abiding convictions, is the surest 
safeguard of free and healthful public life. Had 
our fathers been skeptics or anti-theists, they 
would not have required the president and vice- 

9 



130 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

president, the senators and representatives in 
Congress, and all executive and judicial officers 
of the United States, to call God to witness that 
they intended to perform their duties under the 
Constitution, like honest men and loyal citizens. 
The causes which would have made it unwise to 
introduce any phase of religious controversy 
into the Constitutional Convention have long 
since ceased to exist. We have become a 
united people; the States have coalesced into 
the nation; our political and religious differ- 
ences are of a pacific and emulative nature. If 
there are still reasons why express recognition 
of God's sovereignty and providence should not 
form part of the organic law of the land, they 
are certainly not those by which the minds of 
the authors of the Constitution were swayed in 
omitting to do this. 

Colonel Ingersoll, however, raises objections 
to the recognition of God in the Constitution 
which he deems insuperable, and I proceed to 
examine them. " Intelligent people," he says, 
11 know that no one knows whether there is a 
God or not." This is a radical assertion. To 
know that no one knows whether or not God is, 
one should have a thorough, comprehensive, 
and critical knowledge of the development and 
history of philosophic thought from Socrates to 
Kant and Mr. Herbert Spencer; and I venture 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 131 

to think there are not a dozen intelligent 
Americans who are willing to claim that they 
possess such knowledge. Nearly all intelligent 
men, in every age, including our own, have 
believed in God, and have held that they had 
rational grounds for such faith. What new 
information, what deep insight, what access of 
mental strength have the intelligent people of 
Colonel Ingersoll gained, that they know that 
no man knows whether God is? Has any argu- 
ment for God's existence, however it may have 
been modified, been invalidated or even weak- 
ened by the revelations of science? Kant's crit- 
icism of reason has doubtless affected theistic, 
as it has influenced all modern thought. He 
has shown that all our knowledge is a synthesis 
of contingent impressions and necessary condi- 
tions; and he and the agnostics maintain that 
we know only the conditioned ; but they are 
bound to assume that we know also the condi- 
tions of thought, and these conditions are un- 
conditioned, since they are necessary. We 
cannot know the relative without knowing the 
absolute, nor the phenomenal without knowing 
the noumenal. Modern agnostics, following the 
lead of Kant, deny the objective validity of the 
conditions of thought; but consciousness, wit- 
nesses that the subjectivity of any true category 
is inconceivable. The proofs of God's existence, 



132 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

which Kant's criticism apparently weakened, 
have during the last twenty-five years steadily 
gained in the estimation of the best and most 
impartial thinkers. Stuart Mill, who had been 
brought up an atheist, recognizes their force, in 
the Essays published after his death. The cos- 
mological, the teleological, and the ontological 
arguments in favor of theism, though the man- 
ner in which they are urged has changed to 
conform with our widening knowledge, have 
lost none of their power to convince. 

No believer, it is needless to say, claims that 
we have an adequate knowledge of God, for 
this would be a denial of the necessity of faith. 
He alone can grasp His own infinite perfection, 
and we look to Him as to the sun, with eyes 
blinded by the too great light. But is not all 
knowledge partial ignorance? So long as we 
walk contented through the world of fact and 
appearance, our path is smooth and our prog- 
ress secure ; but when we attempt to look 
beneath and ask ourselves what anything is 
apart from its sensible presentation, we sink 
into boundless regions, where intellectual sight 
grows dim. The mind is superior to whatever 
it comprehends, and hence the Infinite Adorable 
must forever clothe Himself in mystery. But 
our knowledge of the truth of science is not 
more certain or more clear than our knowledge 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 1 33 

of God's being. We know that matter is, but 
what it is we can only conjecture. It can be 
known by us only in terms of mind, and hence 
our knowledge of the soul is more intimate and 
more immediate than our knowledge of cor- 
poreal substance. Unless we are willing to 
accept the crude realism of the uneducated, we 
cannot hold that matter is an object of expe- 
rience. God is the idea of ideas, the ultimate 
in thinking, without whom all thought is chaotic. 
Knowledge begins and ends in belief. We trust 
the testimony of the senses, and the facts they 
reveal to us are received on faith. We can 
know the minds of our fellow-men only by infer- 
ence, and in the same way we know God. We 
do not claim that knowledge without faith is 
sufficient, or that we are able to explain all the 
intellectual difficulties by which our belief in 
God is beset. From the very fact that the idea 
of God is comprehensive of all ultimate ideas it 
is more open to assault than any other. But 
the inference from difficulty to doubt is illogical 
— they are incommensurate terms. There are 
causes of belief which are not reasons. Our 
faith in the freedom of the will is irresistible 
and fatal, and yet there is no logical proof that 
we are free. It is difficult to answer the. argu- 
ments of the idealist, but our confidence in the 
objective reality of the external world remains 



134 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

unshaken. The determinist has weighty con- 
siderations to show that freedom is impossible, 
but all the same we remain conscious of our 
freedom ; the atheist and agnostic advance with 
confidence to prove there is no God, or that 
man cannot know there is, but the human soul, 
in the midst of a transitory and shadowy world, 
cleaves to the Eternal, the source of life and 
love and hope. Americans believe in God, be- 
lieve they know He is, and to assure them, as 
Colonel Ingersoll does, that such faith is evi- 
dence of lack of intelligence, will, I imagine, 
leave the fact unchanged. 

But, if we are, as a nation, to recognize that 
there is a God, what God, asks Colonel Ingersoll, 
shall we choose : the God of the Catholics, of the 
Presbyterians, of the Methodists, or the Baptists? 
This objection is childish, and it is enough to 
answer, that whatever doctrinal differences on 
other points may exist among them, Christians 
and Jews acknowledge one and the same God, 
as Republicans and Democrats have the same 
country, as men of science have for the object 
of their investigations one and the same nature, 
however various and contradictory even their 
views and conclusions may be. 

" The government of God," Colonel Ingersoll 
urges, " has been tried," and he thinks, has been 
found wanting. It was tried in Palestine; in 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 1 35 

Europe, during the Middle Ages; in Geneva, 
under Calvin ; in Scotland, under the Presbyte- 
rians ; in New England, under the Puritans ; and 
as Colonel Ingersoll holds, the result, in every 
case, was failure, cruelty, and misery. But we 
are indebted to the Government of God in Pal- 
estine for our moral earnestness and strength, 
our passion for justice and righteousness. The 
influence which radiated from Jerusalem" has 
stimulated and invigorated every people which 
during the last nineteen hundred years have 
risen to a higher, purer, and more intelligent life. 
The Middle Age sprang from the chaos which 
resulted from the ruin of pagan civilization and 
the incursions of the barbarians. It brought 
order out of chaos, saved Europe from Moham- 
medanism, created parliaments, instituted trial 
by jury, invented the printing-press and gun- 
powder, built the social structure upon the 
monogamic family, preserved the literatures of 
Greece and Rome, produced the manifold and 
sturdy kind of life which made Shakespeare 
possible and which he has made immortal, 
wrested the charter of popular rights from a 
tyrant's hands, and when it was about to fade 
away before the coming age, as the moon grows 
pale when the sun 

" Tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore 
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky," 



I36 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

it sent Columbus to open another world to 
human energy. The Puritans of New England 
have impressed their character upon the whole 
country. To them we owe much of what is best 
in our life. They had the faults which spring 
from intellectual narrowness and religious prej- 
udice, but when I consider their qualities I 
know not where to find such men to-day. 

The government of God has, indeed, been 
tried; but has the government of atheism or 
agnosticism been tried? If there has ever been 
a government of atheists it has existed only 
among the lowest savages ; and as a system of 
thought, atheism gains acceptance only in epochs 
of decadence. It is a creed of despair. A 
universe of ever-beginning evolutions, which 
forever end in dissolutions, to begin and end 
again, without end, is a universe which makes 
pessimism the only possible creed. And as 
for the government of agnostics, who are simply 
hopeless skeptics, it will be sufficient to quote 
Goethe's words : " All epochs of faith, " he says, 
" are epochs of glory, which uplift souls, and 
bear fruit for the present and the future. On 
the contrary, the epochs in which a sad skepti- 
cism prevails, throw, at the best, but a passing 
gleam, whose light does not reach the eyes of 
posterity, because no one wishes to devote him- 
self to the study of sterile things." 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION-. 137 

But Colonel Ingersoll's thesis that the recog- 
nition of God in the Constitution must have, as 
its necessary result, a theocracy, is untenable. 
It is, indeed, manifestly absurd, and flies in the 
face of facts known by all who know anything. 
Is the government of Massachusetts theocratic ? 
In the Constitution of that State, there is more 
than the recognition of God's being. " It is the 
right [I quote from the Constitution], as well 
as the duty of all men in society, publicly, and 
at stated seasons, to worship the Supreme Being, 
the great Creator and Preserver of the universe." 
" If God is allowed in the Constitution," says 
Colonel Ingersoll, " man must abdicate. There 
is no room for both. If the people of the great 
Republic become ignorant enough and supersti- 
tious enough to put God in the Constitution, the 
experiment of free government will have failed. 
. . * With religion government has nothing 
whatever to do. ... If a nation is Christian, 
will all the citizens go to heaven? . . . There 
can be no such thing as a Christian corporation. 
Several Christians may form a corporation, but 
it can hardly be said that the corporation thus 
formed was included in the atonement. For 
instance, several Christians form a corporation, 
— that is to say there are seven natural per- 
sons and one artificial, — can it be said that 
there are eight souls to be saved?" This kind 



I38 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

of writing, which runs through the whole essay, 
is boyish trifling, or worse. It is the kind of 
American style which the cultivated thinkers of 
the world call flippant and vulgar. To affirm 
that there can be no room for God and man in 
the Constitution or anywhere, if it have any 
meaning at all, is bald atheism. If to recognize 
God in the Constitution would prove the Amer- 
ican people to be ignorant and superstitious, to 
believe in God at all is evidence of ignorance 
and superstition; and since Americans, as a 
matter of fact, with few exceptions, do believe in 
Him, Colonel Ingersoll must hold that they are 
ignorant and superstitious. To affirm that there 
can be no such thing as a Christian nation is to 
be sophistical. Nation is an abstraction, and an 
abstraction cannot be Christian, but neither can 
it be free, and therefore there can be no such 
thing as a free nation. " The Church has been/' 
says Colonel Ingersoll, " in all ages and among 
all peoples, the consistent enemy of the human 
race." This is loud and clamorous talk, but 
empty and hollow as the rumbling of winds amid 
waste mountains, where no human voice has 
ever uttered words of sober sense. " Every- 
where and at all times it has opposed the liberty 
of thought and expression." On the contrary, the 
Church has been and is the most strenuous ad- 
vocate of the freedom of the will, without which 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 1 39 

there can be no free thought, and only at times 
and within certain spheres has it sought to pre- 
vent the expression of honest thought. In our 
own country to-day there are thoughts which a 
man would be punished for publishing, and the 
latitude of opinion and utterance which in this 
age may be beneficial, might in altogether 
different social conditions be ruinous. Discus- 
sions which are helpful to mature and enlightened 
men would often be harmful to ignorant youths 
whose animal passions are ever ready to bribe 
what faculty of thinking they may have. The 
barbarian is a youth, as the savage is a child ; 
and the Church, which has had to deal with 
mankind in every phase of development, has 
not always been able to choose an ideal policy. 
" It has/' says Colonel Ingersoll, " been the 
sworn enemy of investigation and intellectual 
development." The Church preserved the lit- 
eratures of Greece and Rome, and by the gen- 
ius which forever burns there, the modern mind 
has been set aglow, and the classics are still the 
best school of the most perfect intellectual cul- 
ture. The authors of scientific investigation are 
Descartes and Bacon. Both were Christians; 
Descartes, a Catholic, educated by the Jesuits, 
and all his life the intimate friend of priests ; 
Bacon, a Protestant, who, in his essay on atheism, 
says : " I had rather believe all the fables in the 



140 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

legend and the Talmud and the Alcoran than 
that this universal frame is without a mind. . . . 
It is true that a little philosophy inclineth men's 
minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy 
bringeth men's minds about to religion. " Not 
only the originators of modern science, but 
nearly all the great investigators of physical 
truth — Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Leibnitz, 
Ampere, Liebig, Fresnel, Faraday, Mayer, 
Agassiz, Van Beneden, Pasteur — were or are 
religious men, Catholics and Protestants. 

Colonel Ingersoll continues his indictment: 
" It has denied the existence of facts, the ten- 
dency of which was to undermine its power." 
The existence of what facts, shown to be 
facts, has the Church denied? Only fools 
deny the existence of well-authenticated facts ; 
and whatever opinion of the men who have 
given direction to religious thought in its 
relations to scientific theories one may hold, 
there are few who will imagine they were 
idiotic. 

" It has always been carrying fagots to the 
feet of philosophy." The Church bore no fagots 
to the feet of Plato and Aristotle, who, after 
Socrates, are the fathers of philosophic thought, 
but it preserved their writings, and its saints 
from Augustine to Thomas of Aquino, have 
been their most illustrious disciples. Colonel 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 141 

Ingersoll continues : " It has erected the gallows 
for genius." Nay, it erected no gallows for 
Dante and Petrarch ; for Lopez de Vega and 
Calderon ; for Corneille and Racine ; for Michael 
Angelo and Raphael ; for Bossuet and Fenelon ; 
for Shakespeare and Cervantes ; for Mozart and 
Beethoven; for Palestrina and Wagner; for 
Goethe and Browning. 

With the genius of the critic who would 
empty the universe of God, and leave man to 
wallow in the slough of matter and to be 
ground to atoms by the infinite fatal machine, 
the Church, doubtless, has never had any 
sympathy. Colonel Ingersoll's love of outra- 
geous assertion is a will-o'-the-wisp which leads 
him into quagmires where there is no solid 
ground of fact or theory. A destructive critic 
necessarily stumbles when his style jolts from 
epigram to epigram. Then Colonel Ingersoll 
is too indignant. Indignation is a passion of 
which we soon weary, one which a good writer 
will rarely indulge, and his wrath at the ways 
of God and religious men, the sublime fury 
which the sight of a priest or a preacher arouses 
within him, have ceased to be interesting. 
Ministers of the Christian religion have doubt- 
less, here and there, committed both crimes 
and blunders, but in the main they have been 
good men working for the good of men. It is 



142 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

easy to find fault with those whose deeds have 
left an impress on the world's history; and 
believers in God and in Christ have been doers, 
while skeptics and infidels have for the «most 
part been content to drift on the infinite ocean 
of talk and discussion. To insist upon the 
failures of religion and to ignore its successes is 
to be unfair. Montesquieu, whose testimony 
on this subject cannot be suspected of partiality, 
declares that this is a poor way to argue against 
religion. " If I were to recount," he says, " all 
the evils which have been done by civil laws, 
by monarchy, and by republican government, I 
should tell the most frightful things." Are the 
crimes and misdeeds, the murders and lynch- 
ings, the adulteries and prostitutions, the 
abortions and infanticides, the dishonesties and 
official venalities, the drunkenness and rowdy- 
ism, which are so common in our country, 
an argument against popular government? 
Tyrants think so, but those who love liberty 
forget the evil in contemplating the good 
wrought by free institutions; and so sophists 
may hold that the Inquisition and the burning 
of Servetus and Bruno are proofs of the harm- 
fulness of religion, but the wise and the judicious 
know that accidental wrongs leave the infinite 
good of faith in a divine order of things 
untouched. 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 143 

If hope were the sole boon religion brings, 
Hope that the end of all is life and light, 
That dawn will break through universal night ; 
Hope that the fount of being upward springs, 
Through graves and ruins and the wreck of things, 
Borne ever Godward with increasing might, 
Till all we yearn for lies within full sight, 
And the glad soul its song of triumph sings, — 

If naught but hope like this religion gave, 
Of all we know or dream of, it were best, 
Though all our life be swallowed in the grave 
Like a brief day that sinks in the dark west, 
Dying forever in the gloomy wave 
And of mere nothingness eternal guest. 

The seventy or eighty thousand Christian 
ministers in the United States to-day, Protestant 
and Catholic, are free from all theocratic pre- 
tensions ; they would repel, if it could be made, 
any offer of union of Church and State ; they 
are lovers of liberty, civil and religious; they 
accept science as the natural revelation of God 
and the friend of man ; they with their brethren 
are busy with every kind of work that can 
comfort, console, strengthen, uplift, enlighten, 
and purify the children of men. That here and 
there some should fail is insignificant. The 
great army still moves forward bearing the 
banner of faith toward God and toward im- 
mortal life. We are a Christian people — why 
should we be ashamed to confess our faith? 



144 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

What true American would not resent as an 
insult the imputation that ours is a godless 
nation. Both Houses of Congress open their 
proceedings each day with prayer, the President 
appoints each year a day of thanksgiving and 
prayer, and, when occasion requires, a day of 
fasting and humiliation. Christianity, in fact, 
though not legally established, is understood to 
be the national religion. No political party is 
hostile to it, or to any particular body of 
Christians. The churches are as popular as 
any of our other institutions. Though the 
Puritan Sabbath is gone, the observance of 
Sunday is general. The interest in theological 
questions, however controversial methods may 
have changed, is still keen, and if now the wave 
of agnosticism seems to be rising, it will break 
and subside, like many another wave of unbelief 
in the past. Nearly all the works of active 
beneficence, in which no country surpasses the 
United States, are carried on by religious men 
and women. Our moral standard is Christian, and 
religious faith is the paramount impulse to good. 
No people has ever become civilized without 
the guidance of religion ; and if a race of men 
could be found who should think there is no 
God and that they are the highest beings in the 
universe, it is impossible to imagine that they 
should not sink to lower and lower planes of 



GOD IN THE CONSTITUTION. 1 45 

life. For such men the world could be but a 
machine, and the enthusiasm which springs 
from faith in divine ideals would die within 
their hearts. Their whole of life would be but 
this : — 

Man wakens from his sleep within the womb, 

Cries, laughs, and yawns ; then sleeps within the tomb. 

Who would exchange the passionate soul of 
youth for knowledge? Who would barter the 
ecstasies of faith, hope, and love for the truths 
of science? Who would not prefer the longing 
for eternal life to a whole lubberland of sensual 
delights? Nay, is not the dream of heaven 
better than the things we see and touch ? Hither- 
to, at all events, civilized society has rested on 
religion, and free government has prospered 
only in religious nations ; and if we are wise we 
shall not imagine that we are exempt from this 
law. A true statesman will look to other things 
than questions of finance and the machinery 
of government. He will seek to keep the 
inner source of life strong and pure, and will 
know that nothing has such power to do this as 
true religion. What good reason, then, is there 
why we should not write God's holy name upon 
the title-page of our organic law? The doing 
this would add to patriotic zeal something of 
the glow and fervor of religious faith. It would 



I46 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

be a recognition of the fact that man's soul 
craves for infinitely more than any government 
can give ; it would awaken in us a deeper con- 
sciousness of the providential mission, which, 
as a nation, we are called to fulfil ; and it would 
infringe upon the rights of no human being. 



V. 



EDUCATION AND THE FUTURE OF 
RELIGION. 

It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profiteth nothing: 
the words that I havespoken unto you are spirit and are life. — 
St. John, vi. 64. 

RELIGION is life in and with God through 
Christ Jesus ; and the stronger, the purer, 
the more loving the life, the higher and the holier 
is one's religion. The Saviour came that men 
might have life and have it more abundantly. 
In Him the life of the Eternal is made manifest. 
He has given to the world a truer idea of life's 
worth, of its sacredness, of its meaning and end, 
than without Him it is possible to have. His 
words are spirit and life, the preaching and 
practice of life. They that know and love 
Him are refreshed by rivers of living water. 
They that follow Him have the light of life. 
He is the way, the truth, and the life. His 
whole work is in favor of life. He gives sight 
to the blind, speech to the dumb, strength to 
the weak, courage to the despondent, faith 
to the doubting, pardon to sinners. He lays 



I4S RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

down His life that men may have immortal 
life. He is the resurrection and the life ; and 
they that believe in Him, though they be dead 
shall live. He is a vital principle for the whole 
human race. He answers the deepest cry of 
man's nature, which is for life and liberty. 
The highest life is the highest we can know. 
It is perfect power, knowledge, goodness, 
beauty, love. In God it is revealed as a trin- 
ity; on earth, it appears as a trichotomy. It 
is vegetable, animal, human : it is physical, in- 
tellectual, moral. It manifests itself in faith, 
hope, and love; in art, science, and religion; 
in the individual, in the home, and in the social 
aggregate. All values derive their worth from 
their power to sustain and develop life, and the 
importance of institutions is measured by their 
influence on life. 

Life, more life, ever-increasing life, is the end ; 
as absolute infinite life is the cause and begin- 
ning of all things. All else is but a means. A 
soul that thinks and acts in the light of thought 
and love is more than a universe of suns and 
planets in which there should be no conscious 
life. Hence material progress is good only in 
so far as it serves spiritual ends. The world 
exists for man; and man exists that he may 
know and love God, and thereby ceaselessly 
grow in power and quality of life, become 






EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 49 

more and more like unto the eternal and all- 
perfect Being, by whom and in whom and 
through whom and for whom he must live or 
else dwindle and perish. 

The law of man's life, therefore, is growth. 
He must continue to grow, or he will lose vital 
force ; and as he develops, the institutions 
whereby his life is sustained and fostered must 
adapt themselves to his increasing wants. As 
in order to live he must renew himself, and 
therefore change, the environment in which he 
is placed must lend itself to his widening needs, 
and therefore change. As God gives to Nature 
the power of self-renewal, it is incredible that 
He should refuse this power to His higher 
spiritual creation. 

Growth is development, and the universal 
means God has given us to unfold and 
strengthen our being is Education. The no- 
blest individuals, the noblest races, are those 
which have received the best education. Re- 
ligion itself, the worship of God in spirit and 
in truth, can be maintained only by education. 
By doing and by teaching, by suffering and by 
dying, Christ founded the kingdom of heaven. 
He commanded His Apostles to go and teach 
all men, having shown them first that they 
could be true apostles and teachers only by 
loving one another, by loving all men, by lov- 



I50 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

ing human perfection, the image of God in the 
soul. The secret of power lies in education, 
in the education which strengthens and illu- 
mines the mind, which purifies and enlarges 
the heart, which forms and confirms the con- 
science. To educate rightly, we must touch 
the depths of man's being; we must speak to 
him in the innermost recesses where faith, 
hope, and love are born, where God is pres- 
ent and appealing. We may not lay the chief 
stress upon practices, however commendable; 
on usages however venerable : we must ad- 
dress ourselves to the mind and the heart 
more than to the senses and the imagination ; 
to the reason rather than to the memory; to 
the whole man, if you will, but never to the 
logical faculty alone. 

The truth which not only makes us free, but 
makes us strong and loving, is not a dead thing. 
It cannot be ticketed and laid away like speci- 
mens in a museum. It is not a collection of 
formulas or a set of rules. It is life, the life 
of the soul ; it is love and beauty and good- 
ness. It is what we live by, and it is only 
by loving it that it can be possessed. If we 
are to educate aright, if we are to make men 
Christ-like, we must not only help them to see 
God in all things, but help them to sympathy 
with all that He has made and makes ; we must 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 151 

enable them to perceive and feel His presence 
not alone in the monuments and deeds of the 
past, but chiefly in the courage, wisdom, knowl- 
edge, love, and power of those who are living 
and acting with us and around us. To be cath- 
olic, we must accept and rejoice in all truth and 
goodness. We must love not only our friends, 
but our foes as well; not doubting that they, 
too, in ways beyond our seeing, help to fulfil the 
divine purpose. No human being knows enough, 
or loves enough, or hopes or believes enough, 
or is happy enough. Let us, then, without 
fear or misgivings, throw ourselves into the 
great world-struggle for truth and justice and 
righteousness ; do what in us lies, to make men 
Christlike, to bring the kingdom of heaven 
nearer, to make all understand that God is in 
the world, and that as man becomes more like 
to Him, the more shall he feel what a divine 
privilege it is to be alive here and now to work 
for the salvation of the race. To this end let 
us put away all narrow thoughts, all sentiments 
that divide and weaken. Let us be persuaded 
that God calls all men to a higher life even in 
this world : first of all, the oppressed, the disin- 
herited, the weak and abandoned. The greatest 
service we can do a human being is to give him 
a right education, physical, intellectual, moral, 
and religious. If it is our duty to do good to 



152 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

all, as far as in us lies, it is our duty to labor 
for the education of all; that no child of God 
may live with an enfeebled body, or a darkened 
mind, or a callous heart, or a perverted con- 
science. Since it is our duty to educate, it is 
our duty to give the best education ; and first 
of all, to give the best education to woman; 
for she, as mother, is the aboriginal God- 
appointed educator. What hope is there of 
genuine progress, in the religious life espe- 
cially, if we leave her uneducated? Where 
woman is ignorant, man is coarse and sensual ; 
where her religion is but a superstition, he is 
skeptical and irreverent. 

If we are to have a race of enlightened, noble, 
and brave men, we must give to woman the best 
education it is possible for her to receive. She 
has the same right as man to become all that 
she may be, to know whatever may be known, 
to do whatever is fair and just and good. In 
souls there is no sex. If we leave half the race 
in ignorance, how shall we hope to lift the other 
half into the light of truth and love? Let woman's 
mental power increase, let her influence grow, 
and more and more she will stand by the side 
of man as a helper in all his struggles to make 
the will of God prevail. From the time the 
Virgin Mother held the Infant Saviour in her 
arms to this hour, woman has been the great 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 53 

lover of Christ and the unwearying helper of 
His little ones ; and the more we strengthen 
and illumine her, the more we add to her 
sublime faith and devotion the power of knowl- 
edge and culture, the more efficaciously will 
she work to purify life, to make justice, tem- 
perance, chastity, and love prevail. She is 
more unselfish, more capable of enthusiasm for 
spiritual ends, she has more sympathy with 
what is beautiful, noble, and godlike than man ; 
and the more her knowledge increases, the more 
shall she become a heavenly force to spread 
God's kingdom on earth. Doubtless our failure 
to win the hearts of all men is due in no slight 
degree to our indifference to the education of 
woman. 

The Church, in virtue of its divine institution, 
has the supreme and absolute right to teach 
Christian truth and thereby to influence all 
education. To her alone Christ gave the com- 
mission to teach whatsoever He had revealed 
and commanded ; and none who believe that 
He speaks the words of the Eternal Father may 
refuse to hearken to the voice of His historic 
Church uttering the things that appertain to 
religion and salvation. Christ did not send His 
Apostles to teach all knowledge, but to teach 
His religion; to teach the worship of God in 
spirit and in truth, in lowliness of mind and 



154 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

purity of heart, as men who hunger and thirst 
for righteousness. In all that concerns the 
religious life the Church has the office of 
Christ, represents Him and speaks with His 
authority; and to enable her to do this with 
infallible certainty, the Holy Ghost was sent 
and abides with her. But Christ did not teach 
literature, philosophy, history, or science ; and 
consequently He did not establish His Church 
to teach these things. He founded a Church, 
not an academy. Non in dialectica complacirit 
Deo salvum facer e popnlum suum. He left natu- 
ral knowledge where He found it ; left it to grow 
by accretion and development, through the ac- 
tivity of special minds and races, with the pro- 
cess of the ages. He bade His Apostles teach 
whatsoever things He had commanded them 
— the doctrines of salvation and the principles 
of Christian living. These things He came to 
reveal ; these He lived and died to plant in the 
minds and hearts of men as seeds of immortal 
life. God doubtless might have made known 
from the beginning all the truths of science; 
but this was not part of the divine economy. 
For thousands of years the race was left to 
make its way amid the darkness of universal 
ignorance ; and when here and there a ray of 
light fell from some mind of genius, it seemed 
quickly to be extinguished amid the general 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION I 55 

obscurity. The philosophy and the science of 
Plato and Aristotle had been in the world for 
three centuries when Christ came, but He made 
no allusion whatever to them. He neither 
praised nor blamed these great masters of all 
who know. Those whom he denounced were 
not the teachers of wisdom, but the formalists, 
who, holding rigidly to the letter of the law, 
and adding observance to observance and rule 
to rule, had lost the spirit of religion, had apos- 
tatized from the infinite love, which is God. 

Christ came to bring immortal faith and hope 
and love to man. He uttered no word which 
might lead us to suppose that He considered 
literature or philosophy or history or science as 
an obstacle to the worship of God in spirit and 
in truth. He denounces greed and lust and 
indifference and heartlessness ; but He does not 
warn against the desire to know, the desire to 
upbuild one's being on every side, to become 
more and more like unto God in power, in 
wisdom, in goodness, and in beauty. He lays 
the stress of His example and teaching upon 
religion, upon eternal things. He tells us that 
we cannot serve God and Mammon, but He 
does not say that faith and reason conflict We 
are human because God is present in the soul ; 
we have reason because the divine light shines 
within us — the light which enlighteneth every 



I56 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

man that cometh into this world. There can 
be no real contradiction between God and His 
universe, between nature and the supernatural, 
between faith and knowledge. On the con- 
trary, the universe is the manifestation of God's 
wisdom, goodness, and power. Nature and the 
supernatural both come from Him; and in 
wider and deeper knowledge, we shall find a 
foundation for a mightier and more spiritual 
faith in the Eternal Father and His divine Son. 
Truth cannot contradict truth; for truth is true 
because it is enrooted in God, who is absolute 
truth and at one with Himself. Things are 
what they are, and God has given us reason, 
that we may see them as they are. The false 
can never be proven to be true, and the Author 
of truth cannot teach error or give grace to 
believe error. All truth is orthodox, whether it 
come to us through revelation, reaffirmed by the 
voice of the Church, or whether it come in 
the form of certain and scientific knowledge. 
Both the Church and the men of science must 
accept the validity of reason, and must there- 
fore hold that reason cannot contradict itself. 
Knowledge and faith both do God's work, both 
help to build man's being into ever-increasing 
likeness to Him. Let us not emphasize the 
opposition between the temporal and the eter- 
nal. God is even here, and even now we are 






EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 57 

immortal ; and whatever helps us to do His will 
by serving more effectively our fellow-men, is 
sacred and of priceless worth. The giving of a 
cup of water in the right spirit is divine service; 
and so is the patient research which leads to a 
knowledge of the causes of suffering and disease, 
and thereby enables us to shut out pestilence 
or to make uninhabitable regions wholesome. 

How infinitely difficult it is to preach the 
gospel effectively to those who live in igno- 
rance and poverty as in the shadow of the 
darkness of death ! All who have striven and 
who strive to educate the whole people, to 
bring opportunity of a freer and more human 
life to all, have been and are, whether intention- 
ally or not, workers in the cause of Christ for 
the salvation of men. 

With what misgiving Catholics and Protestants 
regarded scientific astronomy when it first began 
to gain acceptance ! And yet what has it done 
but make known to us a universe infinitely more 
wonderful and sublime than men had ever 
dreamed of? So it is with all advancing knowl- 
edge. In widening our view of God's work, it 
gives us a more exalted conception of His abso- 
lute perfection; and at the same time it puts 
into our hands more efficient means of working 
for the good of man. A truly catholic spirit 
deems nothing that may be of service to man 



158 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

foreign to the will of God as revealed in Christ. 
We hold fast to the principle of authority : and 
at the same time we believe that man's mind is 
free, and that he has the right to inquire into 
and learn whatever may be investigated and 
known. If the Church is to live and prosper in 
the modern world, Catholics must have not only 
freedom to learn, but also freedom to teach. 
The spirit is not a mechanism, and when it is 
made subject to mechanical rules and methods it 
loses self-activity, becomes dwarfed and formal, 
and little by little sinks into impotence. A ser- 
vile mind can never know the truth which liber- 
ates. Christ did not found His Church to solve 
philosophic, scientific, or historic problems. 
These have been left to human research; but 
Catholics, if they hope to present effectively their 
supernatural beliefs to an age of civilization and 
culture, must not neglect the chief means by 
which the mind is made strong, supple, and lu- 
minous. Our men of ability, whether priests or 
laymen, must be encouraged to put to good use 
the talents with which the Creator has entrusted 
them; and to prepare them for this all-impor- 
tant work we must leave nothing undone to pro- 
vide them with schools equal to the best. If we 
isolate ourselves and fall out of the highest 
intellectual and moral life of the world around 
us, we shall fatally drift into a position of inferi- 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION I 59 

ority, and lose the power to make ourselves 
heard and understood. If in the early centuries 
of Christianity the Church was able to take to 
itself what was true and good in pagan philoso- 
phy and culture ; if St. Augustine and St. Thomas 
of Aquino knewhowto compel Plato and Aristotle 
to become helpers in the cause of Christ, why 
should we lose heart and imagine that the 
Church has lost the faculty of assimilation? 
She is old, indeed, but she is also young, having 
the promise of immortal life ; and therefore she 
can never lack the power to adapt herself to the 
requirements of an ever-evolving environment. 

Since Christ has made the success of His 
religion largely dependent on human effort, not 
annulling nature by grace, but heightening 
rather the play of free-will, we must know how 
to make use of our best and strongest men ; for 
an institution which cannot make use of its best 
and strongest men is decadent. What is there 
to fear? Is it conceivable that human error 
shall prevail against God's truth? Does the 
religion of Christ, the absolute and abiding faith, 
need the defence of concealment, or of sophistical 
apology, or of lies? Truth is the supreme good 
of the mind, as holiness is that of the heart ; and 
truthfulness is the foundation of righteousness. 
The most certain result of the philosophic 
thoughtof thelast hundred years is that the primal 



1 60 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION 

cause and final end of all things is spiritual, not 
mechanical or material. If only we go deep 
enough, we never fail to find God and the soul. 
Shall we dread the results of historical research? 
In the Church as in the world, good has been 
mingled with evil, — the cockle with the wheat. 
What God has permitted to happen, man may 
be permitted to know ; and if we are wise, we 
may glean, even from the least promising fields, 
fruits which shall nourish in us a higher wisdom 
and a nobler courage. A righteous cause can 
never be truly served either by the timid or the 
insincere. And what is true of the history of 
the Church, is true also of the history of the 
Bible. No facts connected with its composition 
can obscure the light of God's word which shines 
forever in its pages, to illumine the path that 
leads to a higher and more perfect life, and in 
the end to everlasting life. 

The fundamental principle of the Catholic 
theologian and apologist is that there is harmony 
between revelation rightly understood, and the 
facts of the universe rightly known; and since 
this is so, the deepest thought and the most 
certain knowledge must furnish the most irrefra- 
gable proof of the truth of our faith. The Cath- 
olic who holds this principle with profound 
conviction will not shrink from any test or any 
adversary. If faith does not give new strength 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. l6l 

to the mind, the heart, the whole man, is it 
genuine faith at all? Shall we cease to desire 
and to strive to know, because we believe? Is 
it not the property of vital belief to impel to 
thought and action? Are not faith and hope 
and love, if they be living, the fountain-heads 
of the highest energy? Does not all history 
prove that right human life is possible only 
when men are self-active in a free and noble 
way, when they strive bravely for more real 
knowledge and greater virtue ? Where we strive 
there is indeed danger of error and mistake ; but 
where we rest in spiritual lethargy, decay and 
ruin are inevitable. A faculty unused dwindles 
until it ceases to be. They who dare must take 
risks : danger can be overcome only by encoun- 
tering danger. Shall the Church speak words 
of approval and cheer to all her children except 
those who labor with honest purpose and untir- 
ing zeal, for deeper and truer knowledge? Shall 
she permit Catholics to fall into the sleep of self- 
contented ignorance, while the great world 
moves on and leaves them in the cerements of 
the grave? 

Opinion rules men, and opinion is nourished 
by beliefs, and beliefs are created and sustained 
by ideas. If we permit ourselves to fall out of 
the intellectual movement of the age, we shall 
lose influence over the minds that create opinion 



1 62 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and shape the future. " One man of science," 
says von Hertling, " who works with success 
in the fields of research, whose name is written 
on the page of history in far-gleaming char- 
acters, and who at the same time leads the life 
of a true son of the Church, outweighs whole 
volumes of apologetics." The truths of salva- 
tion are doubtless infinitely more important than 
the truths of science ; but this natural knowledge 
so attracts the attention and awakens the interest 
of the men of to-day, it so transforms and im- 
proves the methods and processes by which 
civilization is promoted, that it has created a 
new world-view, not only in the minds of the 
few profound thinkers and original investigators, 
but in the general public of intelligent men and 
women ; and if our words are to awaken a re- 
sponse, we must be able to place ourselves at 
the standpoint of our hearers. The theologian, 
the apologist, the orator must be able to say 
to the children of this generation : " We see all 
that you see, and beyond we see yet diviner 
truth." Arguments and syllogisms have little 
power of persuasion. We win men by showing 
them the facts of life ; and to do this we must 
be able to look at things from many points. 
This ability is precisely what the best education 
confers ; for it renders the mind open, luminous, 
fair, supple, and many-sided. 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 63 

We believe that Christ is God made manifest, 
and that the Catholic faith is His revelation. 
If our belief be not vain, the more the light of 
the mind is thrown upon it — its origins, its 
doctrines and its essential tendencies — the 
more divinely true and good and beautiful shall 
it appear to be. In the depths and amidst the 
beginnings of things, even the most clear-seeing 
must grope their way ; and instead of discourag- 
ing them by throwing suspicion upon their 
honesty of purpose, we should be quick to 
overlook their errors, receiving with gratitude 
even the feeblest ray of light they may be able 
to throw on the mysteries of life and being. 
The good and the generous easily overlook the 
faults and frailties of the wise and great. 

To live in the mind, to strive ceaselessly to 
learn more of the infinite truth, is not easy for 
any one. It requires a discipline, a courage, a 
spirit of self-denial, which only the fewest ever 
acquire; and when men of this strength and 
excellence devote themselves to the elucidation 
and defence of the doctrines of religion, we must 
honor and trust them, or they will lose heart or 
turn to studies in which their labors will be ap- 
preciated. If mistrust of our ablest minds be 
permitted to exist, the inevitable result will be 
a lowering of the whole intellectual life of 
Catholics, and as a consequence a lowering of 



1 64 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

their moral and religious life. If we have no 
great masters, how shall we hope to have eager 
and loving disciples? If we have no men who 
write vital books — books of power, books which 
are literature and endure — how shall we expect 
to enter along an inner line into the higher life 
of the age, to quicken, purify, and exalt the 
hopes and thoughts of men? Is the Bible itself 
written with the rigid exactness of a mathemati- 
cal treatise? Is it not rather a book of life, of 
literature, full of symbols and metaphors and 
poetry? What book has been so misunderstood, 
and misinterpreted, even, by honest and en- 
lightened minds, even by theologians themselves? 
Since the inspired writers may thus easily be 
misunderstood, may we not conclude that it is 
our duty to treat with good will and loving 
kindness authors who, not being supernaturally 
assisted, employ the talents which God has 
given them, and which their own tireless in- 
dustry has cultivated to the highest point, to 
clothe the old truths with the light of the wider 
and more real knowledge of the universe and 
of human history, which the modern mind pos- 
sesses? The new times demand new men; the 
ancient faith, if it is to be held vitally, must be 
commended with fresh vigor and defended with 
all the arguments which the best philosophy, 
science, and literature may suggest. Christ 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 16$ 

came to cast fire on earth, and what does He 
desire but that it be kindled? Citrrit verbum 
Dei, says St. Paul; and again: "Woe is me if 
I do not preach. " He is debtor to all men. On 
Mars Hill he speaks to the most enlightened 
minds of his day. He is a reasoner as well as a 
preacher. He places the lines of a Greek poet 
among his own inspired words. To this intel- 
lectual, moral, and religious activity, heightened 
and intensified by supernatural faith, we owe 
the spread of Christianity throughout the Gen- 
tile world, more than to the zeal and labors of 
all the Apostles. Is it credible that if St. 
Thomas of Aquino were now alive he would 
content himself with the philosophy and science 
of Aristotle, who knows nothing either of crea- 
tion or of providence, and whose knowledge of 
nature, compared with our own, is as that of a 
child? St. Ignatius of Loyola says that to 
occupy oneself with science, in a pure and 
religious spirit, is more pleasing to God than 
practices of penance, because it is more com- 
pletely the work of the whole man. Is not 
theology, like the other sciences, bound to ac- 
cept facts? To deny a fact is to stultify one's 
self. But how shall we know what is, if we are 
ignorant of the world-wide efforts of men of 
learning and intellectual power to get at the 
facts of the universe? The supreme fact is life; 



1 66 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

and only that is true, in the best sense of the 
word, which is favorable to life, to its growth, 
its joy, its strength, its freedom, its permanence. 
Whatever dwarfs, whatever arrests, whatever 
weakens life, is evil. 

The great purpose of genuine education is 
not to store the memory or to accustom to 
observances, but to strengthen man with his 
own mind, to rouse him to higher self-activity, 
to vivify him, to give him fresh faith, hope, and 
courage, to deepen the foundations of his being, 
to cultivate his faculties, to give him a firmer 
grasp of truth and a clearer view of things as 
they are. Whatever narrows, whatever hardens, 
whatever enslaves is foreign to the purpose of 
education. We should dread nothing so much 
as what undermines spiritual energy ; for unless 
man's highest powers are stimulated and kept 
active, he falls into sensual indulgence, or be- 
comes the victim of a weak and skeptical tem- 
per, no longer able to believe anything, or to 
hope for anything, or to love anything with all 
his heart. This is the temper of decadent races, 
of perishing civilizations, and of dying religions. 
Losing the power to believe with vital faith in 
God and in the soul, men cling to the phantom 
life of cheap and vulgar pleasures. They seek 
gold and position ; they trust to mechanical 
devices, to political schemes; they worship the 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 1 67 

rising sun ; their truth is what is popular, their 
good is what makes for present success. Having 
no firm hold of the Eternal and Infinite, they 
believe in human cunning, not in the might of 
divine truth. They forget that all truth is ortho- 
dox, and that behind all truth stand the veracity 
and the power of God, who makes Himself 
known in the laws of science, as in the majesty 
of the everlasting mountains and the starlit 
heavens. As a kind word spoken for the love 
of God and man becomes religious, so a right 
spirit consecrates human action in whatever 
sphere. " Whoever utters truth," says St. Au- 
gustine, " utters it by the aid of Him who is truth 
itself." A devout and illumined spirit sees all 
things bound together in harmony and beauty 
about the feet of the Eternal Father. Knowl- 
edge confirms faith, and faith impels to knowl- 
edge. Religion nourishes morality, and morality 
strengthens and purifies religion. Art, in re- 
flecting some feeble rays of the infinite splendor, 
opens vistas of the diviner life. Science in show- 
ing that order reigns everywhere, even in the 
midst of seeming discord, that all things are 
subject to law, gives us a clearer perception 
of God's infinite wisdom and power. Material 
progress itself in making earthly things subject 
to human knowledge and skill, fulfils the will of 
the Creator who made all things for man. 



1 68 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

Thus science and art and progress all con- 
spire with religion to upbuild man's being and 
to mould him into ever-increasing likeness to 
God. It is in religion, however, that the con- 
quering might of the spirit is best revealed, and 
this of itself is sufficient to give it supremacy* 
It is not merely a world-view, a creed, and a 
worship ; but an original and historic manifesta- 
tion in human life of the primal Power, which 
transforms and liberates. It is the breaking 
through of the inner source of being, of God, 
who reveals Himself to the lowly minded and 
the pure of heart, as the beginning and end of 
all that exists; as the One Eternal Absolute, in 
whom and by whom and for whom all things 
are. The soul that is conscious that religion 
rests upon this everlasting foundation is not 
troubled by misgivings as to its truth or useful- 
ness. It is God present in the innermost part 
of our being; it is Christ working with the Al- 
mighty Father to redeem man from subjection 
to the transitory and apparent, from the lust of 
the flesh, from greed for what ministers to the 
senses alone. Thus it is an independent world, 
a kingdom in itself, able to endure and to remain 
the same in the midst of an order of things that 
is forever changing and passing away. What- 
ever alteration may occur in the views of the 
intellectual, whatever decay or transformation of 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 1 69 

political and social institutions may take place, 
religion, the Catholic religion of Christ, shall 
abide, still endowed, after the lapse of however 
many ages, with its original freshness and vigor. 
As our faith in the Divine Master and in His 
work becomes more vital, more radically part of 
all our thinking and doing, the more able shall 
we become to transcend the seeming contradic- 
tions and obstacles, from whatever source they 
spring ; the more clearly shall we perceive that 
our radical experiences and highest intuitions 
are in harmony with His truth, without which 
all life, however happily environed and attended, 
is inchoate and meaningless ; for if there is no 
possibility of a living union of the divine and 
human in the innermost depths of being, all 
hope and faith and love are vain, possession a 
torment, and knowledge a deceptive light that 
lures to destruction ; and as the craving for re- 
demption from death, the craving for immortal 
life becomes more deeply and livingly inwrought 
in human consciousness, the more shall we be 
brought to look on religion as our most essential 
need, as the soul of life, and the less shall we be 
willing to identify it with political institutions, 
or to degrade it to a means to worldly ends. 
Religion shall be dear to us not chiefly because 
it comforts and consoles; not because it con- 
serves and protects our temporal interests and 



170 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

possessions : we shall love it for itself, as that for 
which a man should be willing to sell all that he 
has; as the most priceless gift of God, the gift 
whereby He bestows Himself. Then again men 
of might shall learn to love us; kings shall 
come to offer homage, not with affected rever- 
ence or for selfish ends, but because they shall 
feel that in the Church there is an open fountain 
of life — of the life which, in their best moments, 
all feel to be the essential need of man. 

Then above all, the poor, the afflicted, and 
the disinherited, who heard Christ gladly and 
who have always loved His Church when she 
has not been presented to them in some carica- 
ture, shall gather round us, feeling that in us 
the purest and tenderest love is wedded to the 
highest thought and the most certain knowl- 
edge ; that the essential point is good-will and 
righteousness, that the creation of a right heart 
is the end of ends, compared with which the 
most splendid achievements of worldly knowl- 
edge and power appear theatrical and unreal, 
an unsubstantial pageant which dissolves and 
leaves not a rack behind. From us they shall 
learn to understand that a man is worth what 
the things are worth which he knows and loves 
and believes in with all his heart ; that his life 
does not consist in what he possesses; that to 
be is more than to own ; that place and pomp 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION \J\ 

and ceremony are superfluous where great souls 
live and act. We shall be able to teach the 
multitude to look above and take new heart in 
a world which has never yet been theirs. We 
shall not walk as though we made apology ; we 
shall not speak with bated breath, as though 
we feared lest the great world hear us; we 
shall know and be able to make men under- 
stand that the life which is guided and controlled 
by the ideas of truth, beauty, and goodness, as 
these are revealed in Christ Jesus, possesses 
absolute and indefeasible worth. As the great 
minds of the early Church sought their mental 
culture in the philosophy and literature of Greece 
and Rome, deriving from them, despite the 
errors by which they are disfigured, fresh vigor 
and new arguments wherewith to defend the 
faith, so shall we learn to find in the philosophy, 
literature, and science of our own day — whose 
intellectual, moral, and religious content is so 
much richer than that which gives value to the 
writings of the ancients — helps to higher educa- 
tion and wider views. The wise are willing to 
learn from every man, and the good convert 
what is evil to divine uses. An empire must 
continue to conquer, or it shall be brought to 
ruin. A spiritual power must bring forth new 
things, or the old will fall into discredit. If we 
suffer ourselves to grow timid, if we become 



172 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

confused and hesitate, if we turn away from the 
foe instead of confronting him, how shall we 
hope to inspire confidence in our own sincerity, 
or in the righteousness of our cause? If we 
would spread the faith, we must go forth into 
the world where men think and act ; we must 
be prepared to meet all adversaries and to make 
reply to all objections. We must think before 
we can think alike. We must strive to under- 
stand those who differ from us, for agreement is 
possible only when we understand one another. 
If it is a Christian's duty to have pity for men 
in their sins and miseries, can it be right to 
refuse compassion to those who are in error? 
Are we not all weak, rather than wicked ; igno- 
rant and blind, rather than perverse? Let us 
draw closer together ; let us believe in the good- 
will of the most, which is the essential good. 
If we are Catholic, shall we not first of all be 
catholic in our love, in our readiness to accept 
all truth, and to do good to all men? The 
surest way to improve our fellows is to treat 
them as though they were what they should be. 
It is our duty to make appeal to the best that 
is in man, to encourage all, individuals and 
peoples, to put whatever gifts God has be- 
stowed upon them to the best uses. 

Let us not believe that a dead uniformity is 
the sovereign good. With St. Paul, let us 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 73 

recognize a variety of gifts, and be glad that it 
is possible to serve God and man in many ways. 
There was never yet genuine thinker, or poet, 
or artist whose work may not be brought, if we 
are strong and clear-sighted enough, to con- 
tribute to the cause of pure religion. The 
theologian, the preacher, and the apologist who 
are ignorant of the best that has been thought 
and said by the makers of the world's literature, 
cannot have the culture, the intellectual vigor, 
the openness and pliability of mind, without 
which, short of miracle, it is not possible rightly 
to commend divine truth to an enlightened age. 
They whose vocation it is to be public teachers, 
to mould opinion, and to direct thought, must 
have more knowledge, a wider outlook, a firmer 
grasp of spiritual realities than those whom 
they seek to enlighten and guide. The deepest 
truth seems shallow when uttered by the frivo- 
lous ; the holiest things seem to lose half their 
sacredness when they are entrusted to the 
coarse and ignorant. It is not enough that 
the minister of religion have a pure and loving 
heart, a strong and disciplined mind : he must 
also have the breeding and culture of a gentle- 
man. Manners are not idle ; they spring from 
inner worth ; they are the flower of high think- 
ing and plain living. Christ, it has been said, 
was the world's first gentleman, and they who 



174 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

live and act in His spirit must be gentlemen. 
If we build majestic temples, if we construct 
our altars of costly marbles, if our sacred vessels 
and priestly vestments are made of gold and 
silk and studded with precious stones, why shall 
not they who offer sacrifice and who preach the 
gospel be required to be clean and decorous, 
fair and gracious ? If it is vanity to speak with 
ease and elegance, to pronounce with correct- 
ness and distinctness, to read with right intona- 
tion and emphasis, then must we not say that 
it is vanity also to erect gorgeous edifices 
wherein to worship God, who, as St. Paul says, 
may not be shut in houses made by human 
hands? If the priest is to be educated at all, 
he must receive the most thorough and com- 
plete education. He must trust wholly to grace, 
or he must spare no pains whereby endowment 
may be developed into faculty. 

Thomas a Kempis speaks truth when he says 
that a humble peasant who serves God is better 
than a proud philosopher who, neglecting his 
own perfection, considers the course of the 
stars. But they who seek to know the best 
that is or may be known, need not therefore 
neglect their own perfection ; while they who 
are content w T ith ignorance are necessarily care- 
less of the true self. To labor, in the right 
spirit to strengthen and illumine the mind, is 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 1 75 

to strive to make oneself more like unto God, 
more capable of doing divine work. Does not 
the Saviour teach that they who make the best 
use of the talents confided to them receive the 
most gracious approval? If God chooses the 
weak to confound the strong, He does not 
refuse the service of men of exceptional intel- 
lectual power and moral energy, as the calling 
of St. Paul proves. The supernatural transcends 
nature, but does not annul it, as God is transcen- 
dent and yet immanent. He is the power behind 
the material universe, as he is the power within 
the soul of man. Revelation can be made only 
to rational beings, and reason impels to the 
investigation of all that is intelligible. To for- 
bid men to think along whatever line, is to place 
oneself in opposition to the deepest and most 
invincible tendency of the civilized world. Were 
it possible to compel obedience from Catholics 
in matters of this kind, the result would be a 
hardening and sinking of our whole religious 
life. We should more and more drift away 
from the vital movements of the age, and find 
ourselves at last immured in a spiritual ghetto, 
where no man can breathe pure air, or be joyful 
or strong or free. 

The young, who are the hope of the future, 
can be won and held only by the highest ideals, 
in the light of which they may thrill with hope, 



176 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

and feel that it is a blessed thing to be alive 
and active, to fight the good fight and, if need 
be, to perish in a worthy cause. To speak to 
them with contempt of what the nineteenth cen- 
tury has done, of its science and literature, of 
its truer knowledge of the past, its keener criti- 
cal sense, its amazing progress in carrying out 
the divine command that all things be made 
subject to man, of the success with which it 
has battled against ignorance, poverty, and dis- 
ease, would be to fill them with contempt for 
ourselves, as being men without understanding 
and without heart. We must indeed warn them 
against pride and conceit and halfness and dil- 
ettantism, against irreverence and knowingness ; 
but it were a fatal mistake to imagine that we 
can do aught but harm by seeking to inspire 
them with a distrust of science and culture, or 
with a dread of the influence of such things on 
religious faith. We of all men should be able 
to walk with confidence in the paths of knowl- 
edge. Since we are glad to receive money 
and to have the favor of men in high places 
to assist us in our spiritual work, how shall we 
be willing to lack the help of thoroughly disci- 
plined and enlightened minds, to lack the 
power of thought which is the most irresisti- 
ble force God has given to man? If we look 
upon theology as merely a system of crystal- 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 77 

Hzed formulas, as a science which need take no 
cognizance of the general culture of the age, 
content with presenting the old truths in the 
old way, as merely a larger catechism, with a 
more detailed exposition of definitions and refu- 
tations, we deprive it of power to influence men 
who are all alive with thoughts urgent as the 
growth of wings; who in the midst of problems 
which the new sciences raise and accentuate, 
have grown confused and begin to doubt whether 
human life shall not be emptied of its spiritual 
content. All knowledges are related, as all 
bodies attract and help to hold one another in 
place ; and if we hope to commend and enforce 
revealed truth with efficacious power, we must 
be prepared to do so in the full blaze of the 
light which research and discovery have poured 
upon nature and the history of man. If, in 
consequence, we find it necessary to abandon 
positions which are no longer defensible, to 
assume new attitudes in the face of new con- 
ditions, we must remember that though the 
Church is a divine institution, it is none the 
less subject to the law which makes human 
things mutable, that though truth must remain 
the same, it is capable of receiving fresh illus- 
tration, and that if it is to be life-giving, it must 
be wrought anew into the constitution of each 
individual and of each age. 



178 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

Only that is properly ours which is kneaded 
into our religious and moral life, by our own 
thinking, praying, and doing. What we hold 
but formally is as a garb which may be thrown 
aside as easily as it is assumed. The soul, like 
the body, needs to be nourished and refreshed 
ceaselessly, or it becomes enfeebled and falls into 
apathy. Only those are sources of spiritual 
power and influence who continue to drink from 
the great fountain-head of truth and goodness. 
Hence the best education, that which, whatever 
the method or process, we should always and 
above all seek to give, is the education which 
creates within the soul a quenchless thirst for 
knowledge and righteousness. Our young men 
when they leave our schools cease to be self- 
active, and become helpless, because we have 
failed to inspire them with a divine discontent, 
an ever-present yearning for higher wisdom and 
worthier action. If we are to hope for improve- 
ment in this all-important matter, we must 
begin by providing our colleges, seminaries, 
universities, with a body of thoroughly trained 
and cultivated teachers. Every animal begets 
its like: the strong call forth strength, the 
loving inspire love, they who continue to grow 
awaken in others a desire for ceaseless growth. 

One of the five wounds of the Church, as 
Rosmini sees them, is the inferior kind of 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 79 

professors to whom we entrust the training of 
those who are to be the guides, instructors, and 
models of the multitude. Things have hardly 
improved since his day. Those who hold chairs 
in our institutions of learning still lack the best 
pedagogical knowledge and skill; still lack 
thorough acquaintance with the best philosophic, 
theological, scientific, and literary thought of the 
age. They lack the wisdom which only long 
and deep experience of life can give : they are, 
with few exceptions, still insufficiently remuner- 
ated and still look longingly to the time when 
they shall be permitted to take up some other 
kind of work. To make the situation worse, 
there is a tendency to confine clerical education 
exclusively to the seminaries, the result of 
which must be a lowering of intellectual and 
scientific culture in the priesthood. " The 
Church," says Cardinal Hergenrother, " could 
not give greater pleasure to its deadly enemies 
than by destroying the theological faculty of any 
university, or by calling away from it its 
ecclesiastical students." In the days of their 
greatest power, the Popes deemed it a privilege 
and an honor to foster and protect the universities 
which have had so great a part in creating our 
Christian civilization. What was good and 
necessary in an age of comparative ignorance 
is even more desirable and indispensable in our 



180 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

own, in which education has become the most 
potent factor in the world's progress, in which 
our manifold and ever-growing science has 
placed in our hands new and undreamed-of 
forces wherewith to direct and control political, 
social, and economic life. 

There is nothing now that is not investigated 
and discussed, nothing that is not called in 
question, nothing that is not considered from 
every point of view. We know vastly more 
than the Alexandrian, Cappadocian, and An- 
tiochene doctors, who built the foundations of 
theological science ; more than St. Augustine 
and St. Jerome ; more than Alcuin and Scotus 
Erigena ; more than the great Masters of Scho- 
lasticism. The Scholastics were almost wholly 
unacquainted with the Christian literature of the 
second and third centuries; they had little 
Hebrew and Greek, and but an imperfect 
knowledge of Aristotle himself, whose philos- 
ophy formed the groundwork of their teaching. 
The ancients belong to the world's youth, while 
we are old with the wisdom and science which 
the experience, the research and study, the de- 
feats and victories of thousands of years have 
brought us. We have not only greater knowl- 
edge than they, but we have developed a critical 
and historical sense which they had not, and 
which gives the student a clearer view of the 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION l8l 

meaning and content of scripture, of the devel- 
opment and history of the Church, than hitherto 
it has been possible to have. It were idle to 
deny that the mighty movement by which the 
age is impelled is a menace to much that is pre- 
cious — nay, to much that is of vital and absolute 
worth. The uttermost truth, we are told, is sad. 
We are told that God is a myth, and conscious- 
ness a curse ; or, in another mood it is affirmed 
that nothing can be known save what we see and 
touch, and that our first and only duty is so to 
shape the world that it shall be well with us here, 
for there is no reason to think that there is an- 
other and better life ; that the Eternal is but a 
stream of tendency, whose general drift seems to 
associate right conduct with happiness ; that no 
voice from heaven has ever spoken, and the 
divinest truth we know is that which genius 
utters; that we are under the fatal sway of a 
mechanical universe, and that free-will is a de- 
lusion. Hence some turn to the worship of 
Mammon, and some to that of the goddess of 
lubricity, while the great multitude are losing 
hold on eternal things, and are wandering aim- 
lessly, without God and without hope. Here 
multitudes fall into indifference and formal ob- 
servance; there they follow credulously every 
advocate of a new belief. No opinion is too shal- 
low or too absurd to gain adherents ; no scheme 



1 82 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

too visionary or too fantastic to win helpers. As 
the world is filled with advertisements of reme- 
dies for all bodily ills, so on every side, men 
come forward with panaceas for all our political, 
social, and moral diseases. In the midst of the 
universal confusion we are ready, like the ancient 
Greek, to cry to God to come to teach and 
deliver us. 

Is it possible to look on the great, eager, 
yearning, doubting, and suffering life of man, 
and not to feel infinite desire to be of help? 
Can we believe in our inmost being that we 
have the words of eternal life, and not be roused 
as by a voice from heaven, from our indiffer- 
ence and somnolence, from our easy content- 
ment with formal education and half knowl- 
edge? We do not need new devotions and new 
shrines, but a new spirit, newness of life, a re- 
vivification of faith, hope, and love, fresh courage 
and will, to lay hold on the sources of power, 
that we may compel all knowledge and science 
to do homage to Christ, and to serve in the 
noblest way all God's children. We must be 
resolved to labor to see, not only things as they 
are, but ourselves, too, as we are. Where self- 
criticism is lacking, whether in individuals or in 
social aggregates, decay and degeneracy inevi- 
tably set in. If there are true and wholesome 
developments of life and doctrine, there is also 






EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 1 83 

a false and morbid evolution, against which we 
must be ever watchful. Ceaseless vigilance is 
not the price of liberty alone, it is the price we 
must pay for all spiritual good ; and how shall 
we be ever vigilant, if we are forbidden to criti- 
cise ourselves and the environment by which 
our life is nourished and protected. As walk- 
ing is a continuous falling and rising, so all prog- 
ress is an upward movement through error and 
failure toward truth and victory. As the decay 
of races, the ruin of civilizations, the downfall 
of states, are seen in the end to be helpful to 
the progress of mankind, since they do not per- 
ish wholly, but contribute something of their 
vital substance to those that follow ; so the his- 
tory of human thought shows that while systems 
rise and pass away, even the errors of sincere 
and original minds, associated as they are with 
truth, aid in some way the general advancement 
of knowledge and culture. All things work to- 
gether for those who love God. Action may 
not be dissociated from thought, nor thought 
from action. Doubt is overcome, not by ab- 
stracting and arguing, but by doing the thing 
which is given us to do. The intellect is not 
the centre and soul of life; and knowing is 
not the whole of being. Faith is not a con- 
clusion from a line of reasoning. We cannot 
bind our destiny to the conquests of the mind. 



1 84 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 



We have power to think, but our chief business 
is to act; and therefore we must forever and 
forever fall back on faith, hope, and love, and 
on the conduct they inspire, or we shall be 
driven forth into the regions of mere specula- 
tion, into a dreary world of empty forms. 

Nevertheless, in an age like the present, the 
doctrines of revealed religion can be rightly 
presented and enforced by those alone who 
know philosophy and science, history and liter- 
ature. 

Hence the education which once may have 
sufficed is no longer sufficient. The old con- 
troversy between Catholics and Protestants has, 
to a large extent, lost its meaning, because 
problems of more radical import have forced 
themselves on our attention. In the presence 
of the criticism to which the Bible is now sub- 
jected, we are less concerned to show that it is 
not an adequate rule of faith, than to defend its 
authenticity and inspiration. The discussion of 
its dogmatic teaching is giving place to a more 
earnest desire to make ourselves acquainted 
with the spirit and life that breathe in its pages. 
Too long have we all, Catholics and Protestants 
alike, busied ourselves with disputations about 
the meaning of texts, while we have drifted 
away from the all-tender and all-loving Heart 
of Christ. We have been too eager to make 



EDUCA TION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION. 1 85 

the Scriptures a pretext for argument and con- 
tention, and have forgotten the love by which 
alone men may know that we are the followers 
of Him who died for all. The Bible, con- 
sidered as a rule of faith, has been so mis- 
used that many of us have lost sight of its 
divine use as a book of religious education, as 
a book of life, of the highest, holiest, and most 
blessed life. 

No merely human writings, however pious, 
devout, enlightened, and profound their authors 
may be, can take the place of the Sacred Scrip- 
tures, of the words of the Holy Ghost himself; 
and the more this fountain-head of religious 
inspiration is neglected, whether by priests or 
laymen, the more shall we sink into mere forms 
and observances, into a mechanical and lifeless 
worship, into casuistical inquiries into what is 
or is not permissible. The tendency of these 
things is to narrow minds, to deaden consciences, 
and to make us oblivious of the fact that the 
sacraments themselves require right dispositions 
in the recipients. Where such a temper pre- 
vails, where religiosity is substituted for religion, 
conscience loses its meaning as God's primal 
and most authentic voice, character is under- 
mined, and individuals and peoples degenerate 
and are brought to ruin. The preacher ceases 
to have faith-inspiring, life-giving power, and 



1 86 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

contents himself with commending ceremonies 
and practices, or with the commonplaces of 
moral homily, unable to find words which well 
from the innermost parts of his being, where 
God speaks to the soul and enforces the message 
it utters. The great truth that Christian piety- 
is fostered rather by the prevalence of spiritual 
ideas than by the predominance of ecclesiastical 
persons, no longer determines our course of 
action. 

Not at the altar, or in the pulpit, or in the 
confessional alone, must the priest be prepared 
to show himself as Christ's minister : he should 
possess the breeding and culture needed to make 
him a leader in all spiritual movements, whether 
for wider knowledge, or larger liberty, or sweeter 
and purer life. On whatever subjects are of 
vital import to human welfare, the people 
should be willing to hear him, as the multitude 
flocked to the Saviour, not in the synagogue, 
but on the sea-shore, and the hillside, and in 
the desert, to drink eagerly the words of life. 
In giving his countenance and aid to the cause 
of temperance, of public morality, of law and 
order, in laboring to uplift the poor, to do away 
with political corruption, to secure the enforce- 
ment of the principles of sanitation and hygiene, 
and thereby to help to prevent the spread of 
contagion and pestilence; in seeking to correct 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 87 

the abuses of the theatre, and to restrain the 
license of the press ; in striving to promote 
good-will and Christian charity, by co-operating 
with his fellows in worthy enterprises, whether 
or not their creed is his own — in all this he 
works with God for the welfare of men. If it is 
part of Christian duty to give alms, to build 
hospitals and asylums, to instruct the ignorant 
and to counsel the doubting, it is not less so to 
seek out with diligent industry and patient re- 
search the means whereby sin and misery and 
poverty may be prevented. 

The priest best commends his sacramental 
power and authority, not by emphasizing it, not 
by calling attention to it, but by leaving nothing 
undone whereby he may make himself a true, 
noble, and helpful man ; by so ministering in all 
things that men shall see in him a follower of 
the mild, meek, and serviceable Master; a child 
of the Eternal Father, who is all-wise, all-strong, 
and all-loving. He may not confine himself 
within monastic walls, may not rest content with 
a culture and discipline that are merely theo- 
logic and ascetic : he must go forth into the 
great world as a guide and leader — into the 
world that is controlled by opinion, dominated 
by aims and ideals, which it is his business to 
bring more and more into harmony with the 
truth and love revealed in Christ. He must 



1 88 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 



know that to win men, we must have sympathy 
with them; that to gain their good-will and 
confidence, we must make them understand and 
feel that we are able and eager to help them. 
So only shall it come to pass that laymen shall 
again take an active interest in the welfare and 
progress of the Church, and shall again find it 
possible to co-operate with the priesthood in 
whatever may further the cause of religion and 
civilization. 

I have spoken of what is required of Catholics 
in the present age, from the point of view of an 
American Catholic. This point of view, it seems 
to me, is that which is, or should be, taken in 
the English-speaking Catholic world ; for in 
every part of the earth where English is the 
language of the people, there is a similarity of 
political, social, and religious conditions, so far, 
at least, as Catholics are concerned. In the 
ever-widening domain of the British Empire, 
in the ever-growing territory of the American 
Republic, democracy is triumphant; and in all 
these vast regions, with the exceptions of the 
Anglican Establishment and the Scottish Es- 
tablishment, there is a separation of Church 
and State ; a separation which those who are 
competent to judge recognize as permanent. 
There is everywhere freedom to write, to pub- 
lish, to discuss, to organize; and there is no 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 1 89 

subject of thought, no sphere of action, no 
interest which it is possible to fence about and 
shut in from the all-searching breath of liberty. 
This condition of things exists; every influence 
maintains and strengthens it; and so far as we 
are able to see, it does not appear that any 
earthly power can change or destroy it. It is 
a state of things English-speaking Catholics 
accept without mental reservations, without mis- 
givings, without regrets, which are always idle ; 
and the common rights which are ours in the 
midst of a general freedom, have stirred in us 
an energy of thought and action, which have 
led to triumphs and conquests that have not 
been achieved by Catholics elsewhere in the 
wonderful century that is now closing. A hun- 
dred years ago those who spoke English did not 
count at all in the Catholic Church. They were 
few, poor, and ignorant. Their fathers had held 
to the old faith at the cost of all the earthly things 
that men most seek and cherish. In England 
they were a handful, forgotten and forgetting. 
In Ireland they were ground by the penal laws, 
a system of tyranny the best adapted of all ever 
contrived by the ingenuity of oppressors to 
degrade and dehumanize a people. In America 
they were a small body confined to a few coun- 
ties in Maryland and Pennsylvania, without edu- 
cation, without influence, without consideration. 



190 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

It would have been deemed as probable that the 
worship of Jupiter should revive among us as 
that the Catholic religion should reflourish. 

What a marvellous transformation has taken 
place in the last fifty years, for it is scarcely 
longer than that since the Catholic revival in 
the English-speaking world began. More than 
one-fifth of the bishops who govern dioceses 
are now found in the British Empire and in the 
United States. The Catholics who speak Eng- 
lish are twenty millions or more. In the last 
half century they have built probably as many 
churches, schools, convents, and institutions of 
charity as the two hundred million Catholics 
besides. There have doubtless been losses, but 
in the midst of struggle and battle loss is 
inevitable. Has there, then, been no falling 
away from the faith, no decay of spiritual life 
among the Catholics of other nations? Are 
not our losses in America to be attributed 
largely to the indifference or ignorance of many 
of those who had come to us from countries that 
are called Catholic ? The root of the evil lies 
elsewhere than in our own country. Neverthe- 
less, the history of the Church in the English- 
speaking world during the nineteenth century 
is one of real and great progress ; and there is 
good reason to think that we shall continue to 
advance, since both priests and people are ani- 



EDUCATION AND FUTURE OF RELIGION 191 

mated by the spirit of confidence, of courage, 
of generous zeal, and devoted loyalty to the faith. 
Both alike are persuaded that it is not possible 
to defend and spread the kingdom of heaven 
unless they themselves make ceaseless efforts 
to walk in the light of the ideals revealed in the 
words and life of the Saviour of men. They 
feel that the Church must be a school as well 
as a house of prayer; a source of knowledge, 
wisdom, and power, as well as a fountain-head 
of faith, hope, and love. They believe that God 
is in the world, ready to help those who are 
willing to help themselves. They live with the 
old truths, while they walk unafraid in the 
midst of the vast development of science, culture, 
and material wealth, that is part of the environ- 
ment by which they are nourished and made 
strong. They love the countries where they 
were born or which they have chosen ; they love 
Christ and human perfection ; they love the 
Church which He founded; and therefore are 
they resolved to spare no pains to give them- 
selves and their children the best education, 
to upbuild their being to its full height, that 
they may the more efficaciously work for truth 
and justice, for peace and righteousness, for 
liberty and life eternal. They recognize that 
the Catholic religion is a life to be lived, more, 
even, than a doctrine to be taught and believed ; 



192 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

for only they who seek life in life, whose faith 
is action, whose hope is joy and strength, whose 
love is fruitful, can rightly understand and hold 
the divine truth which Christ came into the 
world to make known. 



VI. 

PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 1 

Our belief is that the Word shall prevail over the entire 
rational creation, and change every soul into His own perfec- 
tion ; in which state every one, by the mere exercise of his own 
power, will choose what he desires and obtain what he chooses. 
For although in the diseases and wounds of the body there are 
some which no medical skill can cure, yet we hold that in the 
mind there is no evil so strong that it may not be overcome by 
the Supreme Word and God. — Origen. 

PROGRESS is increase of the power and 
quality of life. It is this even when it 
seems to be but greater control of the forces of 
nature ; for they are thus made serviceable to life. 
Education is the unfolding and unbuilding of 
life, and it is therefore essentially progress. 
All progress is educational, and all right educa- 
tion is progress. 

The nineteenth century will be known as the 
century of progress — the century in which 
mankind grew in knowledge and freedom more 
than in all preceding ages; in which the 
energies, not of a few only but of whole peoples, 

1 Delivered before National Education Association, Detroit, 
July 9, 1901. 

13 



194 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

were aroused as never before. We have been 
brought into conscious contact with new worlds, 
infinitely great and infinitesimally small; we 
have formed hypotheses which explain the de- 
velopment of suns and planets ; we have traced 
the course of life from the protoplasmic cell 
through all its endless varieties; we have 
followed the transformations of the earth, from 
its appearance as a crust on which nothing 
could live, through incalculable lapses of time 
down to the birth of man and the dawn of 
history; we have resolved all composite sub- 
stances into their primal elements, and made 
new and useful combinations; we have dis- 
covered the causes of nearly all the worst 
diseases, and the means whereby they may be 
cured or prevented ; we have learned how the 
many languages and dialects, with their wealth 
of vocabulary, have been evolved from a few 
families and a few thousand roots; we have 
traced the growth of customs, laws, and institu- 
tions from their most simple to their most 
complex forms. What control of natural 
forces we have gained ! We have invented a 
thousand cunning machines, with which we 
compel steam and electricity to warm and light 
our cities, to carry us with great speed over 
earth and sea, to write or repeat our words 
from continent to continent, to spin and weave 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 195 

and forge for us. The face of the earth has 
been renewed, and we live in worlds of which 
our fathers did not dream. Filled with con- 
fidence and enthusiasm by this wonderful suc- 
cess, we hurry on to new conquests; and as the 
struggle becomes more intense, still greater 
demands are made upon us to put forth all 
our strength. Our fathers believed that matter 
was inert; but we know that all things are in 
motion, in process of transformation. The 
earth is whirling with incredible speed both on 
its own axis and around the sun. A drop of 
water that lies quietly in the palm if it could 
be sufficiently magnified would present a scene 
of amazing activity. We should see that it 
consists of millions of molecules, darting hither 
and thither, colliding and rebounding millions 
of times in a second. The universe is athrill 
with energy. There is everywhere attraction 
and repulsion, an endless coming and going, 
combining and dissolving ; in the midst of which 
all things are changing, even those which appear 
to be immutable. The sun is losing its light, 
the mountains are wearing away. The con- 
sciousness to which we have attained that the 
universe is alive with energy has awakened in 
the modern man a feverish desire to exert him- 
self, to be active in a world in which nothing 
can remain passive and survive ; and as greater 



I96 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and greater numbers are mobilized and set 
thinking, it becomes more and more difficult 
for the individual to stand upright and make 
his way, unless he be awakened and invigorated 
in mind and body. The ideal doubtless is the 
co-operation of all for the good of each ; but 
the fact is the effort of each to assert himself in 
the face of all, and if need be, at their cost. 
Nations, like individuals, are drawn into the 
world-wide conflict. The old cry of vce victis 
still applies, under conditions indeed seemingly 
less brutal, but more inexorably fixed. 

In such a state of things whoever is not alert, 
intelligent, brave, and vigorous, falls, as the 
ancient civilizations fell before advancing armies 
filled with courage and the confidence of irre- 
sistible might. Hence not individuals alone, but 
nations, are driven to educate themselves, that 
they may be prepared for the competitive 
struggle, which is found everywhere as never 
before in the history of mankind. Hence, too, 
in such a society there is necessarily progress 
in education ; for education is vastly more than 
the knowledge and discipline acquired in 
schools. 

The institutions into which men are gathered 
by common needs and sympathies, and by 
which they are lifted out of savagery and bar- 
barism into intelligence and freedom, are the 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 1 97 

family, the state, civil society, and the Church. 
By them the life of individuals and of peoples is 
evolved and moulded more fundamentally and 
thoroughly than it can be by any possible 
scholastic training and teaching. They not only 
provide and defend the things that are necessary 
to man's physical well-being, but they make 
possible the cultivation of his intellectual facul- 
ties. Schools are materially impeded in their 
work when they receive their pupils from vulgar 
or impure homes, or when these are born in a 
tyrannical or lawless state, or in a corrupt civil 
society, or belong to a church which lacks faith 
and authority ; and much of the adverse criticism 
of schools is due to misconceptions which lead 
to the demand that they shall do what it is not 
in their province or their power to do. Indeed, 
where the cardinal institutions are at fault, what 
is needed is not so much schools, as reform 
schools; and a reform school cannot possibly be 
a normal home of education. The rationalistic 
philosophy of the eighteenth century had as one 
of its results an exaggerated belief in what 
schools can accomplish. Kant, who in his views 
on this subject is chiefly influenced by Rousseau, 
holds that man is merely what education makes 
him ; and to educate means for him little more 
than to enlighten the mind concerning the right 
use of human endowments. In his opinion, if all 



I98 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

are made sufficiently intelligent, all will be just, 
helpful, and good. It is the idea of Socrates 
that wrong-doing is only the result of ignorance. 
Though we have largely outgrown this optimis- 
tic faith, it gave a mighty impulse to individual 
and national efforts to establish schools for the 
whole people, of which the national systems of 
the present day are, in great part, the outcome. 
The world-view, however, which has resulted from 
science and scientific theories of the universe, 
has led numbers of thinkers to attach compara- 
tively little importance to enlightenment or men- 
tal culture, and to lay stress chiefly on heredity 
and environment. The opinion tends to prevail 
that the mind and character of man, like his body, 
like the whole organic world, is the product of 
evolution, working through fatal laws, where- 
with human purpose and free will — the possi- 
bility of which is denied — cannot interfere in 
any real way. 

No one who is occupied with education can 
accept this theory without losing faith in the 
efficacy of his efforts and enthusiasm for his 
work. Fortunately, one may admit the general 
prevalence of the law of evolution without ceas- 
ing to believe in God, in the soul, and in freedom. 

This is the position of Kant and it is that 
which nearly all of us take. Without a thought ' 
of denying the power of heredity and environ- j 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION, 1 99 

ment in shaping man's life, we are certain that 
his free and purposive action is able to modify 
and to a large extent control their influence. 
It is, indeed, the tendency of right education to 
enable man to create his world, to teach him 
to live not merely in his material surroundings 
but in the spiritual realms of thought and love, 
of hope and aspiration, of beauty and goodness, 
until these become his proper and abiding home, 
for which climate and soil furnish merely the 
settings and foundations. And when we speak 
of progress in education, we think primarily not 
of a fatal evolution, but of the forces and institu- 
tions which the human spirit with free self-deter- 
mination and deliberate aim makes use of for 
the uplifting of the race. Here too, of course, 
we have growth rather than creation — growth 
of which certain races and peoples (especially 
favored by environment and heredity, we may 
suppose) have shown themselves more capable 
than others; and with our present knowledge 
of history we are able to assign, with some 
degree of accuracy, to each the part it has 
played in the education of mankind. The con- 
tributions of Israel, of Greece, and of Rome are 
known to all. We are less familiar with what 
geology and archaeology have done to throw 
light not merely on the structure and develop- 
ment of the globe, but on the course of human 



200 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

life in epochs of which we possess no written 
account. Wherever man has lived he has left 
traces of himself, which tell his story to the 
trained eye of the scientific student ; and we are 
consequently able to investigate the earliest ef- 
forts of savages, in some remote stone age, to 
bend their rude minds to the conquest of nature. 
The darkness which overshadowed Egypt has 
been dispelled, and the rise and decay of the arts 
of civilization in the valley of the Nile are no 
longer a mystery. Archaeological research has 
done less for the valley of the Euphrates ; but 
much, nevertheless, has been accomplished there 
also. We have learned to read the cuneiform 
characters, which for thousands of years were 
the only literary script of the world. Babylon, 
we have reason to believe, was the source of the 
civilization of China, the oldest now existing. 

" Egypt and Babylon," says Rawlinson, " led 
the way and acted as the pioneers of mankind in 
the various untrodden fields of art, literature, and 
science. Alphabetic writing, astronomy, history, 
chronology, architecture, plastic art, sculpture, 
navigation, agriculture, textile industry, seem all 
to have had their origin in one or other of these 
two countries. " The Turanian or Mongol 
tribes of the valley of the Euphrates were prob- 
ably the first to invent written signs and to estab- 
lish schools. Though we owe to them the 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 201 

original impulses which have led to civilization, 
they themselves never rose above the stage of 
barbarian culture, an ascent which only the 
Semitic and Aryan races have been able to 
make; and among them, in the pre-Christian 
ages, the Jews, who are Semites, and the Greeks 
and the Romans, who are Aryans, have been the 
chief creators and bearers of the spiritual treas- 
ures which constitute the essential wealth of 
humanity. To the first we owe the mighty 
educational force which lies in a living faith in 
One Supreme God, creator of all things, who 
demands of men that they love and serve Him 
with righteous hearts. In their schools they 
emphasized the necessity of religion and moral- 
ity, which are indeed the permanent foundations 
whereon all genuine human culture must forever 
rest. From the Greeks we derive the vital 
elements of our intellectual life, our philosophy 
and science, our literature and art; and their 
educational ideals are the most potent mental 
stimulus in the modern world. The school, we 
may say, is not only a Greek word but a Greek 
institution. 

The Romans excelled all other peoples in 
genius for law and the science and art of govern- 
ment; and hence they believed in discipline 
rather than in culture ; and in their schools, until 
they were brought under the influence of Greek 



202 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

philosophy and literature, their chief concern 
was to make men courageous, dignified, obedi- 
ent, enduring, and reverent. 

When the civilizations of the Jew, the Greek, 
and the Roman declined and fell to ruin, when 
the Empire was broken to fragments by the 
barbarous hordes that century after century 
laid waste its fairest provinces, the world seemed 
destined to sink into the darkness and confusion 
out of which it had been struggling with infinite 
pains for thousands of years; and if a wider, 
juster, and more enduring social state has been 
built on the ruins of pagan culture and religion, 
this has been accomplished chiefly with the aid 
of the principles and ideals of Christianity. We 
possess a faith and insight, a depth and breadth 
of intellectual view, a grasp of the elements 
of human character, a largeness of sympathy 
and appreciativeness, to which no pre-Christian 
people or age ever attained ; and after the most 
patient and conscientious investigation into the 
causes which have made the modern world 
what it is, the impartial and enlightened mind 
is driven to confess that as the civilized nations 
date their history from the birth of Christ, so 
He is the primary and vital impulse in all the 
most excellent things they have achieved. We 
are beyond doubt the heirs of all the past, and 
have become conscious of the debt we owe to 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 203 

Jew and Gentile, to barbarian and Greek; but 
the ideals which determine our views of God, 
of man, of the family, of the state, of the aim 
and end of all progress, are Christian ideals; 
and if this light should go out in darkness, it 
is not conceivable that our civilization should 
survive. The genius of Hellas, as it is mani- 
fested in her greatest philosophers, poets, 
artists, orators, and statesmen, we have not 
surpassed; in our own day some of the noblest 
minds are not consciously Christian. In the 
long conflicts with the barbarism which over- 
whelmed the Roman Empire, individuals and 
peoples who had been baptized into faith in 
Christ have not always, in the midst of the 
confusion and ignorance, of the lawlessness and 
violence, had a clear view of the divine truth, 
goodness, tolerance, and love which are re- 
vealed in him ; have even at times been the 
foes of the godward march of humanity. Yet 
when all is said, the supreme fact remains, that 
with Him the new life of the race begins; that 
in Him its divinest hopes and aspirations are 
enrooted ; and through Him its highest and 
most beneficent conquests have been made. It 
is to Christianity, not to science, that we are 
indebted for our faith in the fatherhood of God 
and the brotherhood of mankind ; in the im- 
mortal and godlike nature of the soul; in the 



204 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

freedom of the will; in the paramount worth 
of character ; in the duty of universal benevo- 
lence, having, as its implication, equality of laws 
and opportunities for all; in the progress which 
is marked by an ever-increasing domination of 
the spirit over matter, and the gradual spread- 
ing of the kingdom of heaven over earth. 

With Christ a new and immense hope was 
born in the heart of man — a hope of ever- 
lasting life and endless progress ; a conception 
of a gradually developing divine purpose in 
history; of a return through labyrinthine and 
devious ways of the whole creation to God, 
from whom it springs. This hope and this 
conception are not found in the religions of 
paganism, nor can science inspire or justify 
them. In the individual and in the race, as 
in nature, growth and decay are simultaneous. 
When the one predominates there is progress; 
when the other, regress and final extinction. 
And as it would be absurd to imagine that a 
human being, in this present existence at least, 
might continue to grow forever, it would not 
be less extravagant to believe that a people or 
the race itself might continue indefinitely to 
make progress. Nations, like individuals, are 
born, grow, and perish; and mankind, to what- 
ever heights they may rise, must rise but to fall. 
The monuments of the most glorious achieve- 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 205 

ments are destined to become fragments of a 
globe on which no living thing can longer be 
found. As endless time preceded the appear- 
ance of man on earth, so endless time shall 
follow his disappearance from the visible uni- 
verse. All that is possessed must be lost, since 
possession is a thing of time, and what time 
gives it takes again. 

If it were possible to embrace in one view 
the entire history of our little planet, we should 
neither be disturbed by the failures nor made 
greatly glad by the successes of men, so inevita- 
ble and transitory it would all appear to be. 
This is the standpoint, this the conclusion of 
science, when it is accepted as the sole and 
sufficient test of reality. But we cannot take 
delight or find repose in such wisdom. Our 
thoughts wander through eternity; our hopes 
reach forth to infinity; we are akin to atoms 
and stars, to the worm and to the Eternal Spirit. 
The whole past has helped to make us what we 
are, and we in turn shall help to make the whole 
future. In the midst of a perishable universe, 
the soul dwells with the indestructible; in the 
midst of a world of shadows, it seeks repose 
with the all-real and abiding One. In all faith 
in progress, in all efforts to advance, we follow 
the light of an ideal, which, if we look closely, is 
found to be that of perfect truth, beauty, and 



206 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

goodness, wedded to absolute power. Whatever 
the means taken to approach it, this is the end 
which noble minds forever hold in view — the 
ultimate goal of all our yearning and striving, 
which the laws of reason and the necessities of 
thought compel us to identify with the Supreme 
Being from whom and to whom ail things move. 
Our way leads not from nothingness to nothing- 
ness, from death to death, but from life to more 
and higher life; from spirit to the Infinite Spirit, 
who is perfect truth, beauty, and love, wedded 
to absolute power. It is possible, even when 
there is question of things the most vital and 
indispensable to human welfare, to take opposite 
views and to defend with plausible arguments 
whatever opinion. One may or may not set 
store by money or pleasure or position or friend- 
ship or culture. He may hold that civilization 
awakens more wants than it can satisfy, creates 
more ills than it can cure ; that art, like the tint 
and perfume of the flower, is but a symptom 
of decay ; that all monuments are funeral monu- 
ments. One may deny free will; or accepting 
it, may think that license is the inevitable result 
of liberty, and that the best fortune for individ- 
uals and societies is to be governed by able 
tyrants. Our estimates depend so largely on 
what we ourselves are that agreement is hardly 
to be looked for. The light which visits young 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 20 J 

eyes is not that which falls on those who have 
been sobered by the contemplation of man's 
mortality. Serious minds have maintained that 
life, together with the means whereby it is prop- 
agated, preserved, and increased, is the sum of 
all evil ; that the love of life is the supreme 
delusion in a universe where whoever feels 
and thinks necessarily suffers irremediable pain. 
Hence they believe not in progress but in 
regress; holding that as all life has sprung 
from the unconscious, the sooner it sinks back 
into it the more speedily shall all things be 
reduced into eternal order. 

This is not merely a speculative view of a few 
exceptional individuals : it has been, and still is, 
the religion of millions in Eastern Asia, whose 
dream is everlasting repose in nothingness ; who 
neither desire nor make progress. The ulti- 
mate standard of value is helpfulness to life; 
for except for the living nothing can have, nor 
be known to have, worth. But our belief in 
the goodness of life is the result of a primal 
feeling, not of philosophic or scientific demon- 
stration. It is essentially a faith which argu- 
ments can neither create nor destroy — a faith 
which draws its nourishment from the conviction 
that life is the first cause and last end of all that 
exists, the most real of things and therefore the 
most excellent; and this conviction has been 



208 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

begotten in the mind and heart of man by the 
Christian religion, with a power which has cre- 
ated a new world, and given to civilization an 
enduring vitality and an all-embracing scope of 
which the most divinely inspired minds of an- 
tiquity could have but visionary conceptions. 

Our Christian faith in God means belief in 
increase of life, in progress, which is His appeal 
and insistence bidding us win His kingdom and 
Himself. It is the ever-widening and deepening 
prevalence of His will, which is good-will to men, 
that they may grow in power of mind, heart, 
and conscience ; that they may be made stronger 
and purer and more healthful in body and in 
soul. Thus progress, whether it be considered 
as inner development and purification or as en- 
larging mastery over the external world, be- 
comes the most legitimate, the most fruitful, the 
most invigorating aspiration of our nature; 
becomes part of all our hoping, thinking, and 
striving. It lies at the heart of the divine dis- 
content which makes it impossible for us to rest 
self-satisfied in any achievement; which turns 
us from whatever is won or accomplished to 
the better things and nobler men that are yet to 
be. It is a resistless urgency to growth, spring- 
ing from an innermost need of freedom and 
light. It dispels ignorance, abolishes abuses, 
overthrows tyrannies, and bears us upward and 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 20g 

onward along widening ways. It sweetens toil 
and gives the courage to bear bravely the worst 
that may befall. 

Faith in the goodness of life, issuing in cease- 
less efforts to develop it to higher and higher 
potencies, has determined our world-view and 
brought us to understand that the universe is a 
system of forces whose end is the education of 
souls ; that the drama enacted throughout the 
whole earth and all the ages has for its central 
idea and guiding motive the progressive spiritual 
culture of mankind, which is the will of God as 
revealed in the conduct and teaching of Christ. 

To sketch the history of the progress of edu- 
cation from the fall of the Roman Empire and 
the decay of pagan learning down to the present 
time would require a much larger canvas than is 
offered to one who makes an address. As a re- 
sult of the ruin wrought by the barbarians, 
whose inroads and depredations continued 
through centuries, what had been the civilized 
world sank into deep ignorance and confusion. 
For a long period learning, banished from the 
continent of Europe, found an asylum chiefly 
in Ireland, in the schools of the monks, whence 
it slowly spread to Scotland and Northern Eng- 
land. When on the continent of Europe, at the 
end of the eighth century, Charles the Great 
began to foster education, he was forced to 

14 



210 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

appeal for assistance to the religious teachers 
of the British Isles. In fact, the first revival of 
learning in mediaeval Europe may be said to 
have been due to the influence of Irish monks. 
They carried their knowledge and discipline 
even to Iceland. Later on they were followed 
by their Anglo-Saxon brethren, under the lead 
of men like Egbert, Wilfrid, Willibrord and Bon- 
iface. In 782 Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon, who 
finally became Bishop of Tours, was placed by 
Charles at the head of the " Palace School " at 
Aix-la-Chapelle, the principal residence of the 
Emperor; and he and his pupils became the 
first teachers of Germany. It was a true revival 
of education; though, on account of the diffi- 
culties of the times and the lack of books, little 
progress was made. The impulse thus given 
continued to be felt all through the disorders 
which followed the dismemberment of the 
Empire of Charles and the fierce conflicts with 
the invading Norsemen and the fanatical Mo- 
hammedans. In the eleventh and twelfth cen- 
turies St. Anselm and St. Bernard, Roscellin 
and Abelard, Peter the Lombard, Arnold of 
Brescia, and John of Salisbury, rendered impor- 
tant service to the cause of enlightenment. The 
Muslims founded universities at Cordova, To- 
ledo, and Seville about the beginning of the 
twelfth century, but these did not flourish more 



PROGRESS IN EDUCA TION. 2 1 1 

than a hundred years; while the Christian 
schools which had grown up around the cathe- 
drals and monasteries in various parts of Europe 
began to develop new life and to enlarge the 
scope of their teaching so as to embrace the- 
ology, law, arts, and medicine. They also ad- 
mitted to their classes and lecture halls students 
from every part of the world. 

From 1200 to 1400 the number of these uni- 
versities increased to about forty, and their 
students were counted by the thousand. " Thus," 
says Davidson, " in the thirteenth and four- 
teenth centuries education rose in many Euro- 
pean states to a height which it had not 
attained since the days of Seneca and Quin- 
tilian. This showed itself in many ways, but 
above all in a sudden outburst of philosophy, 
art, and literature. To these centuries belong 
Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, Thomas 
Aquinas and Bonaventura, Cimabue, Giotto, 
and the cathedral builders, Dante and Petrarch, 
Chaucer and Govver, the minnesanger of Ger- 
many and the trouveres and troubadours of 
France. Scholasticism," he continues, " saved 
Europe from moral suicide, ignorance, and 
fleshliness." 

" In modern Europe," says Emerson, " the 
Middle Ages were called the Dark Ages. Who 
dares to call them so now? They are seen to 



2 1 2 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION 

be the feet on which we walk, the eyes with 
which we see. It is one of our triumphs to have 
reinstated them. Their Dante and Alfred and 
Wickliffe and Abelard and Bacon ; their Magna 
Charta, decimal numbers, mariner's compass, 
gunpowder, glass, paper, and clocks; chemistry, 
algebra, astronomy; their Gothic architecture, 
their painting — are the delight and tuition of 
ours." 

The Renaissance of the fourteenth and fif- 
teenth centuries marks a new advance in the 
educational history of mankind. The treasures 
of the classical literatures were revealed, Amer- 
ica was discovered, the Copernican astronomy 
was divined, the printing-press was invented, 
gunpowder and the compass were applied to 
the arts of warfare and navigation, and voy- 
ages and enterprises of many kinds were under- 
taken. 

" All the light which we enjoy/' says von 
Miiller, " and which the active and eager genius 
of the European shall cause every part of the 
world to enjoy, is due to the fact that at the fall 
of the Empire of the Caesars there was a hie- 
rarchy which stood firm, and, with the help of 
the Christian religion, communicated to the 
mind of Europe, that hitherto had moved 
within a narrow circle, an electric thrill which 
has endowed it with an energy and power of ex- 



PROGRESS IN ED UCA TION. 2 1 3 

pansion, whose results are the triumphs of which 
we are the spectators and beneficiaries. ,, 

In the sixteenth century Rabelais, Erasmus, 
and Montaigne take special interest in questions 
of education and propose important improve- 
ments in method and matter. Luther and Knox 
labored strenuously to establish popular schools 
in Germany and in Scotland. 

The Jesuits devoted themselves with much 
success to education, establishing in various 
parts of the world grammar schools, colleges, 
and universities, in which they taught the clas- 
sical learning and trained many of the greatest 
minds of the seventeenth century ; among others 
Descartes, who is the true father of modern 
philosophy and science. 

In the seventeenth century, also, Comenius, the 
Moravian bishop, propounded and arranged a 
course of instruction, extending from infancy to 
manhood — from the home-school to the uni- 
versity ; and his views have exercised a lasting 
influence on the development of educational 
theory and practice. 

In the eighteenth century Rousseau awakened 
a widespread interest in questions of education, 
though his own views on the subject are generally 
false. He stimulated Kant and Goethe, Base- 
dow and Pestalozzi, to occupy themselves with 
pedagogical problems ; and they in turn com- 



2 1 4 RELIGION, A GNOSTICISM, ED UCA TION 

pelled the attention of many others. Thus at 
the opening of the nineteenth century an enthu- 
siasm for education such as had never before ex- 
isted had been aroused. Hitherto the purpose 
of the school had been to teach the privileged 
classes and to prepare for the learned professions: 
henceforth the whole people are to receive in- 
struction ; for as the ideals of democracy impress 
themselves more distinctly on the general mind, it 
becomes more and more obvious that as all have 
the same rights, all should have the same oppor- 
tunities, the chief and most important of which is 
that of education. The State in consequence is 
led to establish free schools wherein all may be 
taught. Where there is a general political liberty, 
there must be a general enlightenment. To do 
this work an army of teachers is required ; and as 
the principles on which all theories and methods 
of education rest are brought more fully into 
consciousness, greater and greater demands are 
made upon those to whom the office of teaching 
is entrusted. Education being a process of con- 
scious evolution, they who assist and guide it 
must themselves continue to grow. The teacher's 
culture must broaden and deepen as knowledge 
increases. The more progress is made, the more 
difficult his task becomes. It is easier to train 
to obedience than to educate for freedom. This, 
however, is the only true education; for author- 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 21 5 

ity rests on liberty, and its chief end is to secure 
and enlarge the rights and opportunities which 
none but beings endowed with freedom can pos- 
sess. To educate to the freedom which is truth 
it is not enough to strengthen and fill the mem- 
ory, to discipline the practical understanding, 
or to accustom to observances ; one must quicken 
the whole man, must raise and purify the imag- 
ination, the heart, and the conscience. When 
the purpose is to inspire piety, reverence, ad- 
miration, awe, enthusiasm, love, and devotion, 
it can be accomplished by those alone in whom 
these high and holy sentiments are a living power, 
whose thought and conduct create an atmosphere 
in which the soul breathes a celestial air and is 
made aware of God's presence. They who have 
no religious faith or feeling can no more teach 
religion than one who has no literary taste or 
knowledge can teach literature, than one who 
has no musical ear can teach music. 

If in considering educational progress we 
limit our view to our own country, we cannot 
but recognize the advances which have been 
made. From the planting of the colonies, 
indeed, down to the War of Independence there 
was a gradual decline of popular interest in 
schools; and during the Revolutionary period 
there was so much else to occupy public atten- 
tion that little was done to promote education. 



216 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

But in the early part of the nineteenth century 
there was a general revival of intellectual activity, 
and a new enthusiasm for whatever might diffuse 
enlightenment; and it has come to pass that 
now there is an almost universal belief among 
us that the greater the intelligence and virtue 
of the people, the safer will be our political 
and civil institutions, which we hold to be 
founded on permanent principles of reason and 
justice. 

The work which has been accomplished in 
the last fifty years in organizing a great system 
of schools in which free elementary instruction 
is offered to all ; in establishing in cities and 
towns free high schools in which secondary 
education is given to those who desire it; in 
creating for men and women universities, which 
are rapidly widening their scope and increasing 
their effectiveness, has never been equalled in 
the history of any other people. We have 
founded, also, free training schools for teachers 
all over the Union ; and in nearly all the States 
there are schools for defectives and delinquents. 
In our white native population illiteracy has 
almost ceased to exist. All are readers of the 
newspapers at the least, and are thus impelled 
to some kind of mental self-activity concerning 
questions which are of interest to the whole 
world as well as to Americans. In this way the 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION 21 7 

people of the different parts of the country are 
brought into intelligent communion; and in 
learning to understand one another they find 
that it is possible to adjust conflicts, whether 
of interest or opinion, by rational methods, 
without violence or bloodshed. Nowhere else 
is there such popular faith in education, such 
willingness to be taxed for the building and 
maintenance of schools. While the State pro- 
vides elementary instruction for all, it has no 
thought of claiming an exclusive right to teach. 
The liberty of teaching is, in fact, as essentially 
part of our political and social constitution as 
the liberty of the press or the liberty of worship ; 
and hence the State protects and encourages 
all educational institutions; although, on ac- 
count of the special religious conditions of 
America, it has not been deemed wise to devote 
any portion of the public educational fund to 
the support of church schools. 

Our progress in the higher education has 
been even greater and more rapid. The num- 
ber of colleges and of students has doubled in 
little more than a quarter of a century, while 
the standard of admission has been raised in 
nearly all these institutions. The number of 
those who are doing post-graduate work has 
risen in the last thirty years from fewer than 
two hundred to five thousand. Original inves- 



2l8 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

tigation in the various departments of physical, 
historical, archaeological, and political science 
has been introduced and developed. Stress 
is laid on the comparative method of study, 
and serious attempts are made in the best of 
our universities to make philosophy serve as a 
unifying principle for all the sciences, that the 
scholarmaycome to perceive that all the branches 
of knowledge form a whole, in which the parts 
combine as in an organism ; and that having 
attained this insight and comprehensive grasp 
of mind he may be prepared to take up what- 
ever specialty his talent may point out to him, 
without risk of becoming narrow, partial, and 
whimsical ; of losing mental balance, breadth, 
and accuracy of view. In this way, it may be 
hoped, we shall create an aristocracy of culture, 
enlightened, reasonable, and benevolent, which 
shall help to counteract the baneful influence 
of an aristocracy founded merely upon wealth. 

As a result of the diffusion of this more 
serious education, there is a widespread and 
increasing tendency to exact a higher degree 
of culture of candidates for the learned profes- 
sions. In 1800 there were in the United States 
but three schools of theology, three of law, and 
three of medicine; in 1900 there were one 
hundred and sixty-five schools of theology, 
eighty-seven of law, and one hundred and 



PROGRESS IN ED L/C A TIOiV. 2 1 9 

fifty-six of medicine, with about eight thou- 
sand teachers and forty-four thousand students. 
When there is question of education, however, 
as of anything that is spiritual, numbers have 
but a minor significance. What is decisive is 
quality, not quantity. As one mind may out- 
weigh a million, so one school may have higher 
worth than many. We have had, and we have, 
eminent men in the several professions, but the 
average is low — lower than that found in the 
progressive nations of Europe ; and the standard 
of professional attainment is no mean evidence 
of a people's civilization. One who has had no 
serious preparatory mental training cannot ac- 
quire a proper knowledge of theology or law 
or medicine ; and the study of these sciences 
does not give the intellectual discipline which 
is needed for their comprehension. A profes- 
sion is, after all, a specialty ; and the inevitable 
tendency of specialties is to narrow and confine. 
Hence whatever profession one may take up, 
he should first pursue with seriousness the 
studies which enlarge the mind, which make 
it supple, open, strong, and many-sided. A 
professional man should be a gentleman, and 
a merely professional education cannot give 
the culture or develop the qualities which this 
ideal demands. These truths are gradually 
making their way among the observant and 



220 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

thoughtful, especially in the professions them- 
selves. We have, of course, no national author- 
ity which has power to fix standards for degrees, 
and these standards vary from State to State. 
There is a general tendency, however, to de- 
mand more thorough preparation of those who 
seek admission or graduation in the professional 
schools ; and in the last twenty-five years much 
has been done to increase the science and 
efficiency of practitioners and to protect the 
public from the incompetent and unscrupulous. 
But in many of the States the requirements are 
still wholly insufficient; and it is greatly to be 
desired that the professors of theology, law, 
and medicine should find some way of uniting 
with the National Education Association, that 
the professional schools may be brought into 
more vital contact with the educational move- 
ment of the country. It is altogether probable 
that the worst teaching is found not in our 
elementary schools, but in the institutions of 
higher education and professional learning, 
where there is but mechanical repetition of 
what might be better learned from books, and 
where the methods are those of a factory rather 
than of a school of life. 

In scientific and technical education, in com- 
mercial, agricultural, and industrial education, 
we are making genuine and rapid progress. We 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 221 

are above all a practical people, and have the 
genius and the will to excel in matters of this 
kind ; and the triumphs we have won incite us 
to more strenuous efforts to surpass not the rest 
of the world, — for this we have done, — but to 
surpass ourselves. 

The aims and ends of practical education 
appeal to us with irresistible force: they have 
created our ideals. "We regard education/' 
says Daniel Webster, " as a wise and liberal sys- 
tem of police, by which property and life and 
the peace of society are secured." Here is the 
paramount fact : both the school and the Church 
are, in our eyes, chiefly a superior kind of police 
by which property and the peace of society are 
secured. The highest good, therefore, is prop- 
erty and the peace of society. They are ends, 
and whatever else is valuable is so but as a 
means to acquire and preserve property and the 
peace of society. 

Now, property and the peace of society are 
desirable, indispensable even, and must be kept 
in view in every right system of education ; but 
those alone who look above property and the 
peace of society, and strive in all earnestness to 
live in the infinite and permanent world of truth, 
beauty, and goodness, can hope to rise to the 
full height of a noble manhood. 

There is no inspiration in the ideals of plenty 



222 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and stability. He who would rouse men to the 
noblest and most fruitful efforts must not make 
appeal to their love of money and love of ease, 
but must speak to their souls ; must urge them 
to labor for enlargement and elevation of mind ; 
to live for religion and culture, which alone 
have power to create free and Godlike person- 
alities. He must make them know and feel 
that the whole social organism has worth but in 
so far as it is a means to fashion individual men 
into the divine image. This is the ideal of 
progress, the light which invites with irresistible 
fascination the best to toil for increase, not of 
riches but of life ; for the inner freedom, which 
is life's finest flower and fruit ; and not for com- 
fort nor luxury nor art nor science. This is the 
ideal of religion which is infinite yearning and 
striving for God. This is the ideal of culture 
which develops endowment into faculty, which 
gives the mind possession of its powers, mak- 
ing it a self in a world it upbuilds and keeps 
symmetrical and fair. 

Where man has no opportunity nor freedom 
to educate himself, we have social conditions 
such as those of India, with its castes ; where 
education is merely formal and practical we 
have a world of arrested spiritual growth, as 
in China. 

The fabric of the life of the individual is 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION 223 

woven for him by society; and as he is a crea- 
ture of society, he is drawn almost irresistibly to 
what has the greatest social influence and pres- 
tige — to power, wealth, and fame. And since 
only the very few can hope for fame or great 
power, the multitude are driven to the pursuit 
of riches, in which there is an element of real 
power and of fictitious fame, as well as the 
means of procuring much else that all men hold 
to be valuable. Thus ideals are largely deter- 
mined by environment. What circumstances 
appear to make most desirable we hold to be 
the best. Things carry their commands with 
them, and necessity knows no law. 

In America our environment, our fortune, our 
success, have combined to make us practical, to 
urge us to the conquest of matter, to mechani- 
cal inventiveness, and to the accumulation of 
wealth ; and hence we have been led to believe 
we may look on religion and culture as valu- 
able chiefly for what they do for the protection 
of property and the peace of society. But the 
reverse of this is the true view. Property and 
the peace of society have as their end the fos- 
tering of religion and culture. To live for 
material things is to live to eat and drink, 
and not to eat and drink that we may live in 
the soul, may think and love and do righteously. 
Food, clothing, and shelter are necessaries of 



224 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

our animal nature ; and since they cannot be 
possessed and at the same time communicated, 
the labor by which they are acquired tends to 
beget a selfish disposition, to become a struggle 
for existence, in which heartlessness and greed 
take the name of legality, and are sought to be 
justified by the plea of the force of circum- 
stances, of the nature of things ; and the final 
result is oppression, hatred, and general dis- 
order, which bring about the loss of property 
and the destruction of the peace of society. 
Truth, goodness, and beauty are necessaries of 
man's spiritual nature ; and they are not exclu- 
sive, but increase when they are shared. It is 
possible to attain them only by genuine and 
sympathetic communion, by loving God and the 
whole human brotherhood ; and hence the striv- 
ing for them produces an unselfish temper, a 
spirit of good-will and helpfulness, the final 
outcome of which should be a society whose 
constitutive principle is the co-operation of all 
with each and of each with all ; and which shall 
lift the race above the conflicts of interests, 
whether those of individuals or those of nations, 
into the realms of eternal truth, goodness, and 
beauty. When these hopes are realized, the 
nation will become a kingdom of heaven on 
earth, where the aim and end of authority shall 
be to make men intelligent, virtuous, and free, 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 225 

capable of self-guidance and self-control ; where 
whatever is true shall be also popular; where 
all shall lead a fair and holy life with God and 
in the company of their fellows. 

Let those who will, believe that this can never 
be more than a dream. It is, at least, the ideal 
of the noblest souls, and should be that of all 
educators. But if they are to walk in its light 
they must have definite conceptions of the be- 
ings whom they seek to develop and fashion. 
What is man? What is his destiny? What 
consequently should those who deliberately in- 
fluence him strive to make of him? These are 
the previous questions to which some definite 
answer must be found before teachers can know 
whether what they do is right or wrong. With- 
out such knowledge they can hope at the best 
to build in the child's consciousness but a frag- 
mentary, incoherent world, not a cosmic whole. 

Now, if we are to take a deep and abiding 
interest in ourselves or in the race to which we 
belong, we must see ourselves and mankind in 
God, and not in matter merely. We cannot be- 
lieve that this life is infinitely good and sacred, 
possibly we cannot believe it to be a good at 
all, unless we believe in immortal life. But the 
teacher derives his inspiration and enthusiasm 
from faith in the worth of life ; and therefore 
from faith in God, as eternal essential life. 



226 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

" Education," says Davidson, " should encour- 
age true religion, but it should be free from 
sectarian bias." A religion free from sectarian 
bias can mean, I suppose, only a religion with- 
out a creed, without intellectual or moral princi- 
ples ; a religion, therefore, which can neither be 
taught nor loved nor lived. The phrase, to 
encourage religion, shows the weakness of the 
position. If religion is anything, it is the deep- 
est, holiest, and highest; and should be, not 
encouraged, but striven for and cherished 
infinitely. 

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler affirms the neces- 
sity of religious education; and holds also that 
a religion without dogma, without intellectual 
and moral principles, is a meaningless religion. 
But, having a clear view of the obstacles to a 
denominational system of state schools in a 
country like ours, he throws the whole burden 
of religious instruction on the family and the 
Church. In America, however, a very large 
number of families have no positive religious 
belief or feeling. Again : It is the tendency of 
free schools to diminish the sense of parental 
responsibility. When the State or the Church 
assumes the labor and the expense of instruct- 
ing children, fathers and mothers easily persuade 
themselves that in sending them to schools thus 
provided they are quit of further obligation, so 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 227 

far as their mental and moral instruction is con- 
cerned ; and hence in our country the homes in 
which no serious religious education is given 
are increasingly numerous. 

There are grave reasons for thinking that the 
churches are unable effectively to perform this 
all-important work. But a small part of the 
children attend Sunday-school ; and if all at- 
tended, a lesson of an hour or two once in seven 
days can produce no deep or lasting impres- 
sions. The result, then, of our present educa- 
tional methods and means can hardly be other 
than a general religious atrophy; and should 
this take place we shall be driven to confront 
the problem whether our ideals of manhood and 
womanhood, of the worth and sacredness of 
human life, whether our freedom, culture, and 
morality can survive. Religion and virtue are 
the most essential elements of humanity, and 
they can be taught; but they are the most dif- 
ficult of things to teach, because those alone in 
whom they are a life principle bodying itself 
in a character which irresistibly inspires rev- 
erence, mildness, love, and devotion, can teach 
them. 

This indeed is a truth of universal appli- 
cation ; for whenever there is question of ed- 
ucational efficiency and progress, the primary 
and paramount consideration is not methods 



228 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

nor buildings nor mechanical agencies of what- 
ever kind, but the teacher. " The proof that 
one has knowledge," says Aristotle, " is ability 
to teach." Whatever is a vital element of one's 
being, whether it be religion or virtue, or aes- 
thetic or scientific proficiency, he can teach; 
and, in the proper sense, he can teach nothing 
else. We can teach what we know and love to 
those who know and love us. The rest is drill. 
They have done most for progress in education 
who have done most to enlighten and inspire 
teachers. It is work of this kind that has given 
Horace Mann his pre-eminence among Ameri- 
can educators. Much of his success was due, 
doubtless, to his insistence on the practical value 
of education, on its influence upon " the worldly 
fortune and estates of men," on its economic 
worth, its power to improve the pecuniary con- 
dition of the commonwealth. 

Half a century ago such an ideal had even 
greater attractiveness for Americans than at 
present. But Horace Mann made use of his 
reputation to inspire and enforce better things. 
He pleaded for the establishment of Normal 
schools, holding that in every system of educa- 
tion the principal need is competent teachers. 

The Normal schools which have been founded 
all over the country have rendered important 
service; but we have passed the point of view 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 229 

of their early advocates, and see clearly that the 
training which even the best of them can give is 
insufficient. The teacher's profession, like every 
other, is a specialty; and if he have merely a 

professional knowledge and skill, lie is ncce 

rily narrow, partial, and unappreciative of the 

best. He larks the philosophic mind, the com 

prehensive grasp of truth, which, whatever his 

subject, will enable him to keep in view the 
wide fields of life and knowledge, and so to 

guide his pupils to live with greater conscious- 
ness and power in their whole being, I lence we 
shall more and more demand of those who 

apply for admission into the Normal schools 

that they come with minds seriously cultivated. 

We have begun to establish teachers 1 colleges 

and to affiliate them with our universities, mak 

ing education a faculty like law or medicine or 

theology, 'This university faculty will help US to 
form a race of professional teachers who shall 
possess the requisite literary, scientific, and 

pedagogical knowledge and skills who shall 
walk in the light of the ideals of human per- 
fection! and be sustained in their labors by the 

love of human excellence ; who shall understand 
and practise the art of stimulating thought 
awakening interest, steadying attention, and cul- 
tivating appreciativeness. t4 It would be a great 
step in advance/ 1 says Quick, " if teachers in 



230 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

general were as dissatisfied with themselves as 
they usually are with their pupils. " 

The divine discontent is that of great toilers 
who feel that to strive faithfully in a worthy 
cause is reward enough. 

The best school fails in the case of many of its 
students; great men make themselves great, 
while the inferior remain what they are in spite 
of persistent efforts to raise them to higher 
planes. But such considerations do not dis- 
courage the teacher who has faith in the power 
of education to transform human life; and if 
hope deceive him, he cherishes at least a noble 
illusion, which is a source of joy and strength. 

The mother's high thoughts of the future of 
her child may never be realized, but how much 
worse for her and for him would it not be if she 
had none of the heavenly dreams which the 
love-inspired imagination evokes to make life 
fair and fragrant ! The wise take an exalted 
view of the teacher's office, and they know the 
difficulties by which he is beset. He is made to 
bear the sins of parents and the corruptions of 
society. His merit is little recognized, and his 
work is poorly paid. The ignorant take the 
liberty to instruct him, and they who care noth- 
ing for education become interested when he is 
to be found fault with. The results of his labors 
are uncertain and remote, and those he has 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 23 I 

most helped rarely think it necessary to be 
thankful. But if he knows how to do his work 
and loves it, he cannot be discouraged. 

And, after all, both he and his work are 
appreciated now as never before. Teaching has 
become a profession ; and the body of teachers, 
conscious of the general approval, are impelled 
to more serious efforts to acquire knowledge 
and skill ; and in consequence they exercise an 
increasing influence in moulding public opinion 
and in shaping the destiny of the nation. Hold- 
ing aloof from religious controversy and politi- 
cal strife, they are drawn more and more to give 
all their thought and energy to create schools 
which shall best develop, illumine, and purify 
man's whole being. To accomplish this, two 
things above all others are necessary: to en- 
lighten and strengthen faith in the surpassing 
worth of education, not merely as a means to 
common success, but as an end in itself; and then 
to induce the wisest and noblest men and women 
to become teachers. We must help greater and 
greater numbers to understand and love the 
ideal of human perfection, and to believe in 
education for the transformation it is capable of 
working in man and in society. It doubtless 
equips for the struggle for existence, for the 
race for wealth and place ; but it does better 
things also. It gives to human beings capacity 



232 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

for higher life, for purer pleasures, for more per- 
fect freedom. It is the key which unlocks the 
secrets of nature ; it is the password to the de- 
lightful world of best human thought and 
achievement, making the wisest and noblest who 
have lived or are now living the familiar ac- 
quaintances of all rightly cultivated minds. It 
makes us able to gain a livelihood ; and, v/hat is 
infinitely more precious, it inspires the wisdom 
which shows us how to live. 

The more comprehensive our grasp of the 
meaning and power of education becomes, the 
easier shall it be to persuade the best men and 
women to devote themselves to teaching; for 
we shall make them feel that the teacher does 
not take up a trade, but the highest of arts — 
the art of fashioning immortal souls in the light 
of the ideals of truth, goodness, and beauty. 
" A teacher," says Thring, " is one who has 
liberty and time, and heart enough and head 
enough, to be a master in the kingdom of life." 

Education is furtherance of life ; and instruc- 
tion is educative only when the knowledge ac- 
quired gives truer ideas of the worth of life, and 
supplies motives for right living. The teacher's 
business — his sole business, one might say — 
is to awaken and confirm interest in the things 
which make for purer and richer life; for inter- 
est compels and holds attention; and interest 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION. 233 

and attention result in observation and accuracy, 
which are the characteristics of cultivated minds. 
If our interests were as manifold as the thoughts 
and labors of all men, we should all find it pos- 
sible to approach to completeness of living; for 
it is easy to live in the things which interest us. 
He who is shut in the circle of his family or his 
business or his profession, is necessarily a par- 
tial and mechanical man, whose relations with 
God and men cannot be full and vital. The 
world of his consciousness is fragmentary and 
hard, not whole and fluid. He is alive but at 
points. When the flame of his existence is ex- 
tinguished, it goes out in utter darkness ; for he 
has kindled no celestial fire in other minds and 
hearts. Such a one cannot be a teacher, for he 
cannot illumine the mind or speak to the heart ; 
and it is with minds and hearts that he must for- 
ever occupy himself. What is knowledge but a 
mind knowing? What is love but a heart lov- 
ing? In books there are symbols of knowledge, 
but knowledge itself exists in minds alone. 
Hence whatever his matter, the teacher looks 
always to training of mind and building of char- 
acter, and to the information he imparts chiefly 
in its bearing on this end of all education. 
From his point of view, a yearning for knowl- 
edge, faith in its worth, in the ability and de- 
light it gives, is more important than knowledge 



234 * RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

itself. A taste for study, a passion for mental 
exercise, compels to self-education; whereas 
one who knows many things but is indifferent 
and indolent forgets what he has known. 

Information is, of course, indispensable ; and 
the methods by which it may be best imparted 
must be understood and employed by the 
teacher ; but the end is a cultivated mind, open- 
ing to the light as flowers to the morning rays, 
for rain and knowledge as the growing corn 
athirst for sunshine. In a rightly educated mind 
intellectual culture is inseparable from moral cul- 
ture. They spring from the same root and are 
nourished by like elements. They are but differ- 
ent determinations of the one original feeling, 
which, so far as man may know, is the ultimate 
essence of life. Moral character is the only 
foundation on which the temple of life can stand 
symmetrical and secure ; and hence there is a 
general agreement among serious thinkers that 
the primary aim and end of education is to 
form character. 

As moral culture is the most indispensable, 
it is the most completely within the power of 
those who know how to educate. It is possible 
to make saints of sinners, heroes of cowards, 
truth-lovers of liars ; to give magnanimity to 
the envious, and nobility to the mean and 
miserly; but it is possible only when we touch 



PROGRESS IN EDUCATION-. 235 

man's deepest nature and awaken within him a 
consciousness of God's presence in his soul ; for 
it is only when he feels that he lives in the 
Eternal Father that he is made capable of 
boundless devotion, that his will lays hold on 
permanent principles and is determined by 
them to freedom and right. 

When men lose the firm grasp of the eternal 
verities, character tends to disappear; for at 
such a time it becomes difficult to believe that 
any high or spiritual thing is true or worth 
while. Faith in the goodness of life is under- 
mined, and the multitude are left to drift at the 
mercy of passions and whims, having lost the 
power to believe in the soul or to love aught 
with all their hearts. At such a time there is 
more urgent need that those who have influence 
and authority should consecrate themselves to 
the strengthening of the foundations of life; 
that the young especially may be made to feel 
that virtue is power and courage, wisdom and 
joy, sympathy and blessedness ; that they may 
learn reverence and obedience ; respect for 
others, without which self-respect is not possible ; 
that they may come to understand that all 
genuine progress is progress of spirit; that in 
all relations, human and divine, piety is the 
indispensable thing, useful alike for the life 
which now is and for that which is to be. Such 



236 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

a fortune as ours has not been given to any 
other people. Our life sprang from the love 
of religion and liberty; and if it is to endure, it 
must be preserved by the principles from which 
it sprang; and if these principles are to remain 
with us as the vital force of all our hoping and 
striving, they must be implanted from genera- 
tion to generation in the minds and hearts of 
the young. 



VII. 

THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 1 

WHATEVER brings us into personal rela- 
tions with wider worlds, with larger and 
more enduring life, gives us a sense of freedom 
and joy; for we are the prisoners of faith, hope, 
and love, and are driven to make ceaseless appeal 
to them to enlarge the confining walls ; to con- 
stitute us, if so it may be, dwellers in a bound- 
less universe, where truth and beauty and 
goodness are infinite; where what uplifts and 
deifies is eternal; where, ceasing to be the 
slaves of animal needs, we are made citizens 
of a spiritual kingdom and have divine leisure 
to live for and in the soul. Now, more than 
anything else religion is able to realize for us 
these ideals ; to diffuse itself through our whole 
being ; to level the hills and fill the valleys, to 
bridge the chasms and throw assuring light into 
the abysses of doubt and despair ; to make us 
know and feel that God is near, that He is our 
father and has the will to save. So long, then, 
as human nature is human nature religion shall 
1 Delivered at Eden Hall, Philadelphia, Nov. 21, 1900. 



238 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

draw and hold men ; and without it nor wealth 
nor position nor pleasure nor love can redeem 
them from the sense of the vanity and nothing- 
ness of existence. The things of time are 
apparent and relative ; the absolute reality, the 
power within and above the whole, religion, and 
religion alone, reveals. 

The efficacy, therefore, of an organization to 
keep pure religious faith alive and active is the 
highest test of its worth, and the Catholic Church 
when tried by this test stands pre-eminent. 
Her power to speak to the mind, the heart, the 
imagination, the whole man, is proclaimed and 
dreaded by her enemies; while those who 
believe in her are stirred to tender and grateful 
thoughts at the mention of the name of her 
whom they call Mother. She is dear to them 
for a thousand reasons. Has she not filled the 
earth with memorials of the soul's trust in God? 
Who has entered her solemn cathedrals and 
not heard whisperings from higher worlds? 
Her liturgy, her sacred rites, her grave and 
measured chants ; the dim lights that ever burn in 
her sanctuaries ; the mystic vestments with which 
her ministers are clothed ; the incense diffusing 
a hallowed fragrance through the long, with- 
drawing aisles ; the bells that morning, noon, 
and night repeat the Angel's salutation to Mary 
and seem to shower blessings from heaven — 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 239 

all this speaks to the soul, subdues and softens 
the heart, until we long to bow the head in 
prayer and give free course to the gathering 
tears. 

Can we not read in the countenances of 
those who love her truly, the story of lives 
of patience and reverence, purity and mild- 
ness? How unwearyingly do they labor ! How 
serenely when death comes do they rest from 
their labors ! What a heavenly spell has she 
not thrown, does she not still throw, over 
innumerable souls, creating in them habits of 
thought, love, and deed, against which theories 
of whatever kind are advanced in vain ! They 
have made experiment; they have tasted the 
waters of life ; they know and are certain that 
it is better to be for a single day in the holy 
place of the Lord than to dwell for a thousand 
years in the habitations of sinners. Has she 
not the secret of teaching the poor and 
unlearned the higher wisdom — the wisdom 
that lies in the spiritual mind and the lowly 
heart; making them capable of feeling God's 
presence and of viewing all things in their rela- 
tions to Him who is eternal ; enabling them to 
forget their nothingness in the consciousness of 
co-operating with Him for ends that are abso- 
lute, under the guidance of heaven-appointed 
leaders, comrades of the noble living and the 



24O RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

noble dead ; certain that though they die yet 
shall they live ? Thus she turns her true chil- 
dren to righteousness, lifting the individuality of 
each from out the crushing mass of matter and 
of men; giving them deeper convictions of the 
sacredness and worth of life, of the possibilities 
that lie open to the meanest soul if he be but 
converted to God, who even in the most 
degraded can still see some likeness of 
Himself. 

The Church has power to attract and hold 
the most different minds. In all the centuries 
since Christ was born, among all the races of 
men, she has found followers and lovers. She 
impresses by her long descent, her historic 
continuity, her power to adapt herself to an 
ever-varying environment; by the force with 
which she resists foes whether from within or 
from without; at all times maintaining her 
vigor, despite the corruptions of her children 
and the hatred and persecution of the world; 
thus manifesting herself as the city of God, 
the kingdom of Christ, a spiritual empire in 
which there is an imperishable principle of 
supernatural life and of indefectible strength. 
The unity of her organization and government, 
the harmony of her doctrines, the consistency 
of her aims and purposes, the sublimity of her 
ideals, the persistency of her efforts to mould 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 24 1 

the minds and hearts of men into conformity 
with the will of God, make appeal to what is 
best in human nature. 

Her catholicity, too, — her diffusion through- 
out the world, her assertion and maintenance of 
the whole body of revealed religion; her ability 
and readiness to assimilate and consecrate to 
divine uses whatever is true or good or fair in 
nature and in art, in literature and in science, in 
philosophy and in the teachings of history ; hold- 
ing nothing alien to her constitution or to the 
ends for which she exists, that may be made to 
declare God's power and mercy and wisdom, or 
to render less dark and helpless and sorrowful 
the lot of His children on earth, — this also is 
a plea to which generous souls must hearken. 
Then, her claim of authority — of the gift to 
utter with inerrancy divine truth to an erring 
race, asserting at once the highest social prin- 
ciple and the supernatural character of the 
society established by Christ; setting herself, 
as the organ of the Holy Spirit, in the highest 
place, as the interpreter of the doctrines of 
salvation, even though they be consigned to 
inspired books, since books can never be the 
fountain-head of right belief or the tribunal of 
final resort for a body of living men, — this also 
compels attentive and serious minds to reflect 
and to weigh whether the denial of the infalli- 

16 



242 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION " 

bility of the Church does not lead, with the 
inevitableness of a logical conclusion, to the 
denial of revelation. 

Her history, which carries us back to the 
origins of the modern world, bringing us face 
to face with the Roman Empire, at the zenith 
of its power and splendor, when the little 
band that walked with Jesus of Nazareth by 
the shores of the Sea of Galilee and over the 
hills of Judea seemed scarcely to exist at all, so 
insignificant they appeared to be; and then, as 
the years pass by, placing before our eyes as 
in a panorama the passion and death and res- 
urrection of the Saviour, the hesitations and 
misgivings of the Apostles, the ascension into 
heaven, the coming of the Holy Ghost; the out- 
burst of the divine enthusiasm which impelled 
the believers to go to the ends of the earth that 
by their words and deeds, by their lives and 
deaths, they might spread the glad tidings and 
bear witness to the supreme and awful fact that 
God had visited His children and redeemed them 
from the curse of sin, throwing open the gates 
of life to men of good-will in the whole wide 
world, without distinction of race or tongue, — 
that the Church after the lapse of centuries is 
still able to speak to us and tell us, as though 
she were a divine person who had lived all the 
while, that of all this she was part, and to the 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 243 

truth of it all bears testimony, doubtless must 
uplift, strengthen, and reassure whosoever gives 
due heed. 

Our confidence in her increases as we behold 
her in mortal conflict with imperial persecutors 
and savage mobs, whose fury seeks the utter 
abolition of the name of Christian; while her 
faithful children — old men and young, matrons 
and maidens — gather round her to shed their 
blood in her defence ; until finally, when three 
hundred years have passed and hundreds of 
thousands have offered their lives as a sacrifice 
and a testimony to God and the soul, she comes 
forth from the desert and the underground dark- 
ness, unafraid and unhurt, to enter on her great 
task of converting the world to the religion of 
the Son of Man. With what superhuman con- 
fidence and power she battles against ignorance 
and barbarism, lust and greed, violence and 
rapine ! She grows not weary, but generation 
after generation sends her heroic sons wherever 
lies the shadow of the darkness of death, that 
they may bring all the tribes of the earth to see 
the new light which has shone from the throne 
of the Most High. 

With a divine enthusiasm they turn from the 
pride of life, the thirst for gold and the pleasures 
of sense, abandon father and mother, country 
and friends, to give themselves wholly to the 



244 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

task the Master imposed upon His Apostles 
when He bade them go and teach the nations ; 
bidding all men to turn from evil and to seek 
first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, 
— a kingdom which holds for those who enter 
the secret of happiness and of all the enduring 
good both for the time that now is and for eter- 
nity. How joyously they take up their work, 
seeking the lost sheep in interminable forests, 
in unexplored islands ; confronting barbarous 
chiefs, and hordes inured to rapine and blood ; 
uttering the praise of lowly mindedness and 
cleanness of heart, of peace and mildness, of 
love and mercy, where such words had never 
been spoken before — to men whose whole 
theory and practice of life was war and robbery 
and extermination; who had not even the idea 
of humanity, but considered all who were not 
united to them by ties of blood as natural 
enemies ! 

Is it not marvellous that this far-spreading 
and irresistible enthusiasm for the conversion 
and uplifting of the race should have burst 
forth just when the civilized world was sinking 
beneath the weight of hopeless impotence and 
degradation; when tyranny, brutality, greed, 
and lust had destroyed all that gives life worth 
and joyousness? — that from the midst of the 
vices that are born of despair should spring 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 245 

superhuman hope and courage ; from out a 
world given over to hate and cruelty, where 
the poor are oppressed and trampled on, where 
those who in battle escape the sword are re- 
served for butchery in the arena, there should 
arise the tenderest and most passionate love for 
all who suffer and are heavy laden ? The old 
world is dying, and the new is waiting to be 
born. A new religion is here founded on new 
conceptions of God and of man — on new con- 
ceptions of man's duties to God, to himself, and 
to his fellows ; on the faith that the Eternal 
and Omnipotent, from whom and by whom and 
in whom all things are, is a father who has care 
of even the least of His children, and who so 
loves them that He sends His Divine Son to 
teach and guide them, to suffer and die for 
them. 

Since God is love, love is the supreme law of 
the universe ; and man's first duty and highest 
perfection is to love God and all men. This is 
the gospel, the glad tidings arousing millions 
from sleep in the shadow of death. Belief in 
the pagan deities had perished in the hearts of 
all who thought, leaving in its place blank 
atheism or mere nature-worship, which favored 
the indulgence of the baser appetites and repro- 
bated no crime. Even the noblest and the best 
either doubted whether there were gods or were 



246 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

persuaded that if such beings existed they had 
no concern with human affairs. Out of this 
mental incapacity, moral debasement, and spirit- 
ual paralysis there breaks forth a fountain-head 
of new life — a race of men and women who are 
certain that God is, and that He is their father. 
Not now, indeed, for the first time is He called 
father, but for the first time the name as applied 
to the Supreme Being implies a tender, personal 
and intimate relationship with man. The Divine 
Spirit is breathed into the soul, and awakens a 
consciousness of the infinite worth and precious- 
ness of life. That the all-high and omnipotent 
God should enter into personal relationship with 
the lowliest of His children, should cherish, 
cheer, guide, and uphold them, seems too fair 
and gracious and exalted a thing for mortals to 
believe of themselves; yet it is what this new 
race is persuaded of, and it is the most astound- 
ing and most quickening faith that has ever 
taken possession of human hearts. Is it incred- 
ible that He who makes and holds the universe 
in poise should love? And if He loves, is it 
incredible that He should love those whom He 
has made capable of love, in whose spiritual 
being He has awakened a quenchless thirst for 
truth, goodness, and beauty? 

Whatever man may think, woman cannot 
doubt that God is love, or that Christ is that 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 247 

love made manifest. Woman is the heart, man 
the mind ; and great thoughts spring from the 
heart. She lies closer to the sources of life, to 
the faith and wonder of children, to the supreme 
reality that is veiled by what appears ; and she 
is guided by a divine instinct to understand that 
the infinite need is the need of love. Love is 
her genius, her realm, her all the world. She 
feels what only the wisest know — that the 
radical fault is lack of love; that if men did 
but love enough, all would be well. From the 
dawn of history she had been the great prisoner 
of faith, hope, and love. With a divine capacity 
for the highest spiritual life and the highest 
spiritual influence, she had been made a 
drudge, a slave, a means, an instrument. As 
it is easy to hate those whom we have wronged, 
the pagan world, having degraded and outraged 
woman, seemed to take pleasure in heaping 
scorn and ignominy upon her ; and even to-day 
in heathen lands her lot is little better. 

Classed with slaves, thrust aside, mistrusted, 
kept in ignorance, her whom nature had over- 
burdened, man was not ashamed to trample on. 
The wife makes the home ; the mother, the man. 
And yet in reading the literatures of Greece 
and Rome we are hardly made aware that their 
great men had wives and mothers, so little does 
woman play a part in their history, except as an 



248 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

instrument of pleasure. The ancients, in fact, 
had no right conception of love; never knew 
that God is love, that the last word of all things, 
the absolute and final good, is love ; that true 
love, or the love of the true good, which is itself 
love, is the central source whence all wisdom 
springs. Christ having come, religion is, as 
Pascal says, God sensible to the heart, which 
has reasons of its own that reason hardly knows ; 
a method of its own, which is the method of 
charity — that of Jesus, who finds the root and 
source of all sin in the lack of affection, in the 
hardness of the heart that seeks itself and is thus 
made the victim of pride, of greed, and of lust. 
Nothing is beautiful, nothing sublime but the 
immensity of love ; and nothing brings perfect 
joy and peace but complete self-surrender to 
God, which is love's highest act. Divine beauty 
holds the secret of the universe, — it is the cause 
of love, and love is the cause of all things. They 
alone have the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Christ, 
who love Him and all men. Whatever we do, 
if it be done for love, is rightly done. Like a 
pure flame, love embraces, interpenetrates, and 
fills with light every duty imposed upon us ; 
nay, if duty be also love, nothing else smiles on 
us with so fair a face. " Where there is love," 
says St. Augustine, " there is no toil; or if toil, 
the toil itself is loved." They who love God 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 249 

think not of themselves, but give their time, 
their strength, their heart, their health, their life, 
to serve those whom it is possible for them to 
help. Our capacity is measured by our power 
of love. We can do or learn to do whatever 
with all our soul we desire and will to do. As 
we are most surely reached through our affec- 
tions, our nature is best explained by them. 
We are what we love far more than what we 
think ; for it is our love rather than our thought 
that impels us to act, to put forth and make 
objective the true self. We are judged by our 
works, but our works are the offspring of our 
love. Hence love is the test of the kind of 
being we are : it is the proof that we are the 
disciples of Him who is God's love made a 
sufferer and a sacrifice. 

If love is the mark of discipleship, how shall 
woman be excluded ? If sacrifice is the law of 
love, its way and means, how shall she who from 
the beginning has been the bearer of the world's 
burden of sorrow be unequal to the ordeal? If 
love is patient, kind, gentle, lowly minded ; if it 
bears all things, hopes all things, believes all 
things, endures all things ; if it runs, if it flies, if 
it is glad, if it is free, where shall it find a home 
if not in woman's heart? If charity is the greatest 
of all things, and chastity its twin-sister, where 
may the double crown be so fitly placed as 



250 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

on woman's brow? If the charity of Christ 
constraineth us, who shall so willingly yield to 
the heavenly compulsion as woman? 

In truth, the Saviour is associated with woman 
as no man before or since has ever been associ- 
ated with her. Through Him, the Virgin Mother 
holding the Divine Child in her arms is the most 
hallowed object on earth. The woman taken in 
adultery, and that other whose sin was known to 
all the city, draw near to Him, and at once we 
breathe an air as pure as thoughts that rise in 
immaculate hearts. He never appears more 
beautiful and godlike than when mothers crowd 
around Him, kneeling for blessings on their 
children. How tender and holy are His rela- 
tions with the sisters of Bethany ! Mary Mag- 
dalen is the type of that innumerable multitude 
of victims whom man, in his brutal passion, hav- 
ing outraged and degraded, spurns and casts 
forth into hopeless misery. And Jesus speaks 
but a word to her, and she is made pure and 
forever sacred to all noble and generous souls. 

In His religion nothing great shall be accom- 
plished unless woman put her hand to the work. 
To her the Angel is sent to announce His com- 
ing. She is with Him at the manger, with Him 
in His flight and exile, with Him in all the 
years of His hidden life, with Him at the mar- 
riage feast, with Him when He hangs on the 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 25 I 

cross. To a woman He first appears when He 
has risen from the dead. And when He is no 
longer visible on earth, the hearts of women 
follow after, seek and find Him in the unseen 
world, where what is pure and fair is forever so : 
where no shadow of change or evil can fall 
upon the face of love. He revealed woman to 
herself, revealed her to man. Until He taught, 
suffered, and died, the inexhaustible treasures of 
her great heart of pity and love were unknown 
even to herself. 

Aristotle, the clearest and strongest intellect 
of the pagan world, had said : " Both a woman 
and a slave may be good ; though perhaps of 
these the one is less good and the other wholly 
bad." In what another world we are than that 
of this mighty master of those who know, when 
we hear Him who is more than man : " Many 
sins are forgiven her, because she hath great 
love ! " " If men were quit of women they 
would probably be less godless," said Cato the 
censor; but Our Lord, when He lifts woman to 
the level of His own heart, shows us that by 
mothers, wives, and sisters, by pure and holy 
women chiefly, shall godliness be kept alive 
among men. The highest influence is spiritual 
influence, and henceforth it shall be exercised 
by woman in a larger degree than by man ; and 
in every age open and sincere minds shall be 



252 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

able to exclaim withLibanius, the pagan teacher 
of St. Basil and St. Chrysostom : " What women 
these Christians have ! " 

The soul is greater than a universe in which 
there should be no soul ; and when God is wor- 
shipped in spirit and in truth — that is with love 
and sacrifice — the soul of woman clothes itself 
with a wealth of beauty and devotion. In the 
days of persecution she suffers at Rome, at 
Lyons, at Carthage, the worst that fiendish 
cruelty can invent, with a heroism and serene 
cheerfulness which men have never surpassed. 
The desert has no terrors for her if her life be 
hidden in God with Christ; and as wife and 
mother she inspires a reverence and confidence 
that fill the home with a joy and peace which 
make it a symbol of heaven. The Church itself, 
the bride of Christ and the mother of souls, 
appears to her faithful children in the semblance 
of a woman clothed with chastity and beauty 
and transfigured by love. When she comes 
forth from the catacombs to plant the standard 
of the Cross on the Capitol, and the labarum on 
the ruins of Jerusalem, the victory is due to St. 
Helen more than to Constantine. Anthusa, 
Nonna, and Monica gave to the Church St. 
Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. 
Augustine. Macrina and Scholastica stand as 
noblest allies by the side of their brothers, St. 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 253 

Basil and St. Benedict, the founders and law- 
givers of monasticism. At Tolbiac, Clovis 
invokes the God of Clotilda, and a woman led 
the Franks to the foot of the Cross. 

Throughout the Middle Age, from Queen 
Blanche, the mother of St. Louis; and the 
Countess Mathilda, the strong helper of Gregory 
VII. ; and St. Clare, the friend of St. Francis of 
Assisi, to St. Catherine of Siena, who brings 
the Pope back to Rome after an exile of seventy 
years ; to Joan of Arc, who delivers France from 
its foreign tyrants; and to Isabella of Castile, 
who sends Columbus to discover the New 
World, what a great and beneficent role woman 
plays in the history of religion and civilization ! 
Looking to Mary as their model, whether 
mothers, wives, or consecrated virgins, — to 
Mary whom none have invoked in vain, whom 
none have served and not been made thereby 
lowly minded and chaste, — they founded the 
home, converted nations, upheld empires, taught 
in universities, and inspired the enthusiasm 
which created the Christian chivalry dedicated 
to the honor of womanhood and to the defence 
of all that is helpless; springing like a fair 
flower from the double root of chastity and love, 
to sweeten the air and fill the world with high 
thoughts and aims. 

The world, indeed, was still full of darkness 



254 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and violence, as even to-day it is full of greed 
and lust; but the regenerative principle had 
been planted in innumerable hearts, and a 
beginning of the transformation of woman's life 
had been made. She has been enrolled in the 
brotherhood of the race ; her soul is as precious, 
her life as sacred, her rights as inviolable as 
man's. As a person, her origin and destiny are 
the same as his; as a member of the family, 
founded on monogamy, her office is the highest 
and holiest ; and the Church stands by her side 
to protect her against the tyranny of man's 
more brutal nature, by defending, with her great 
and mysterious power, the sanctity and indis- 
solubility of the marriage tie. 

Ideas become fruitful and productive of good 
only when they are embodied in institutions: 
and the root principles that God is our Father 
and all men brothers ; that chastity and gentle- 
ness, reverence and obedience, patience and 
love, have priceless value ; that woman and the 
child are infinitely sacred, could not have created 
a public opinion favorable to their acceptance 
and diffusion had they not been taken up into 
the life of the Church ; had they not been pro- 
claimed and enforced by her, and made part of 
her organic structure. It was not mechanical 
and scientific progress, not the increase of 
wealth and knowledge, but her influence, her 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 255 

ministry, her orders, her whole social fabric, 
that preserved the monogamic family and lifted 
woman to a grace and power in the world she 
had hitherto never known. In the face of 
whatever wrongs and degradations, even though 
found in the sanctuary itself, she proclaimed 
the doctrines of righteousness, asserted the 
majesty and supremacy of the law. Abuses 
never discouraged her; wrongs never diminished 
the ardor with which she defended the home 
against the passions that threatened its ruin; 
and in this warfare that which first of all was 
at stake was woman's honor and welfare. 

But while she consecrates and guards the 
temple of domestic love, the Church maintains 
that a state of perfect chastity, of virginity, has, 
from an ideal point of view at least, yet higher 
and holier worth. In marriage the man and 
the woman are little more than the instruments 
whereby the race is multiplied and preserved. 
But human beings are primarily and essentially 
ends, not means ; and the most precious results 
of a people's life, of the life of the race itself, 
are noble and godlike personalities. The right 
estimate is not by number and quantity, but by 
kind and quality. The continuance of the race 
is indispensable, but it is not less indispensable 
that individuals should move upward in the 
light of true ideals. Hence Our Lord seems to 



256 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

lay the chief stress of his teaching and example 
on the perfection of the individual soul. Failure 
here is utter failure, though one should gain the 
whole world. Hence, too, the Church concerns 
herself first of all with the overcoming of sin, 
with the creating of holiness, with salvation of 
souls. She appeals to those who hear the divine 
whisperings in the innermost parts of their being, 
to turn from pride and greed and sensuality, — 
the vices most opposed to human perfection, to 
holiness, to the soul's salvation, — and to conse- 
crate all their life to humility, poverty, and chas- 
tity, that they may find the blessedness of the 
lowly minded, of the clean of heart, of those who 
possess nothing but have all, since they have 
peace and love. 

We judge of a man's wisdom by his hopeful- 
ness, it has been said. Better still may we 
judge of it by his humility. If he be wise he 
says to himself: The world is too great for 
thee: in the universe thou art as though thou 
hadst no being at all. Whether thou think or 
strive, thou art blind and weak. Yet do thy little 
with a brave and cheerful spirit. This is all 
that is required of thee. Thou art not worthy 
to be the least of God's servants. Learn, then, 
to bear with a humble and patient heart what 
is or shall be given thee to bear ; thankful that 
thou hast been able even for a moment to look 






THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 2$y 

to Him with devout faith and hope, and to bless 
His name. If he truly know himself, however 
much he be praised and extolled, he can never 
be flattered into self-complacency. Others he 
may please, but not himself. 

This wisdom of the thoughtful is revealed to 
sincere and innocent souls, who when they look 
to God find that they can know and love Him 
only when, in self-forgetfulness, they deny them- 
selves and think only of Him. They are meek 
and mild; and whatever they do or suffer, the 
spirit of lowly-mindedness precedes, accom- 
panies, and follows them. They are peaceful, 
patient, faithful, and obedient. It costs them 
little to resign their own will that they may 
walk the more securely in the way of the divine 
counsels. As the hearts of children are drawn 
to a mother, as exiles yearn for home, they turn 
from a world they hardly know, — not caring to 
know it, — and long to fly from all the vanity 
and show, all the strife and turmoil, to seek in 
the company of kindred souls the sense of 
security and freedom, the quiet and the bliss 
that belong to those who have found the truth 
and follow after love ; who, having overcome 
the pride of life, give themselves to the service 
of sufferers and little ones. As they seek not 
honors and distinctions, they are not fascinated 
by the glitter of gold — the world's great 

17 



25 8 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

idol, master, and slave. They know that the 
only true wealth is life: since life, ever more 
perfect life, is the supreme and final end of 
action : and that, more than almost any other 
passion, greed — the love of money — destroys 
in men the power to form right estimates of life 
and conduct; for it forces them to look away 
from the perfecting of their own being and the 
good of their fellows, to what is material and 
external, and therefore but incidental. 

The fear of the poor is their poverty, says the 
book of Proverbs. This may mean that the 
helpless condition in which poverty places 
them is ever a source of anxiety and dread ; 
but, rather, I think, that this anxiety and dread 
are themselves poverty ; while they who possess 
nothing, but have faith and courage and love, 
are rich enough and free enough from fear. 
The possessions to which we cling breed cow- 
ardice ; but wealth of soul is confidence and 
strength. He who loves is rich ; for love creates 
its world, and fills the desert or the prison cell 
with a light and joy which the loveless, 
though they dwell in palaces, can never know. 
It is life's fairest flower and best fruit: and he, 
therefore, who gives new power of love, gives 
new life and raises us to higher worlds. Hardly 
can a rich man feel that it were well if all were 
as he ; but the wise and good are certain that 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 2$9 

what they know and love is the best any human 
being can know and love; that they who make 
themselves worth possessing and become masters 
of themselves have the truest and most gracious 
possessions. 

What doth it avail a fool to have riches, asks 
Solomon, seeing that he cannot buy wisdom? 
Ruskin rightly says that all vices are summed 
up, and all their forces consummated, in the 
simple acceptance of the authority of gold 
instead of the authority of God, and in the pref- 
erence of gain or increase of gold to godliness 
or the peace of God. Again : " Occult theft — 
theft which hides itself even from itself, and is 
legal, respectable, and cowardly — corrupts the 
body and soul of man to the last fibre of them. " 
Of what evils is not greed the fountain-head? It 
darkens the mind, dulls the wits, hardens the 
heart, warps the conscience, and perverts the 
understanding. It breeds hate, dissension, 
injustice, and oppression; makes thieves, liars, 
usurers, cowards, perjurers, adulterators of food 
and drink, and anti-social criminals of every 
kind. It stirs up wars of conquest, robs whole 
nations, and stares in stolid indifference while its 
victims starve by the million. It is more insati- 
able than lust and more cruel than revenge. It 
considers faith, honor, and truth, purity and 
innocence, patriotism and religion, as wares to 



260 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

be bought and sold. It is in sum atheism, 
which, turning from God and the soul, drives its 
votaries, in a kind of brutish madness, to strive 
to clutch the universe of matter ; deluding them 
with the superstition that the more they grasp 
and call their own the greater they become. 
Their personality seems to grow as the circle of 
their possessions enlarges, as though a man's 
money could be himself. 

Greed, in drying up the fountains of noble 
life within, reduces its slaves to a kind of ma- 
chine whose one office is to get gold. It de- 
grades all their impulses and passions. They 
are not ambitious of glory or fame or honor or 
of any noble kind of influence or power, but all 
their ambition falls upon matter. Their sole 
desire, their one thought is to amass wealth. 
They are not jealous of those who excel them in 
moral or intellectual qualities, who have more 
faith or genius or virtue than they, but of those 
alone who have greater possessions. They are 
decadent, they are degenerate ; but the world is 
so prone to this superstition that public opinion 
measures by commercial standards not only 
the worth and importance of individuals but 
the strength and civilization of nations. The 
ideal is the ever-increasing production and dis- 
tribution of what ministers to man's physical 
needs — everything for the body, nothing for 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 26 1 

the soul : everything for enjoyment, nothing for 
virtue. 

Blessed be Christ, who, being rich, became 
poor, that He might reveal the wealth there is 
in the life of the spirit, in love and righteous- 
ness, in truth and holiness; that He might 
make it plain that the kingdom of heaven is 
within us; that it is wherever God is known, 
obeyed, and loved, though the setting be the 
stable, the workshop, or the cross; that the 
right kind of man makes a fair world wherever 
he is thrown, while the weak and the doubting 
seek comfort in lamentations over their lot or 
deliver themselves up to the service of Mammon 
and the tyranny of the senses. The more 
human we become, the more Christlike, the less 
are we the slaves of physical conditions and 
necessities. 

It is not the purpose and end of Christ's re- 
ligion to make men rich and comfortable : it is 
its purpose and end to lift them to worlds where 
riches and comfort cease to have value or mean- 
ing. They who turn from the things the vulgar 
crave, and seek the source of true life in spheres 
to which the senses do not lead, alone know the 
infinite sweetness and joy there is in serving 
Him. They must learn to be cruel to them- 
selves, to withstand even their lawful desires, if 
they would drink the living waters of the foun- 



262 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

tain of peace and bliss. Not by intellectual 
processes can He be discovered, but by leading 
a life which none but the modest and mild, the 
lowly minded and pure hearted, can live. If we 
would have the higher, we must renounce the 
lower. Heroic abnegations are required of 
those who would enter on the perfect way. It 
is not enough that they be humble and obedient 
and free from greed : they must also be wholly 
chaste. 

There is something more worthy of the soul 
than the pursuit of wealth ; and there is a higher 
calling than marriage, holy though it be. As 
there is in man an immoderate desire for riches, 
there is also in him an insatiate craving for pleas- 
ure. Mountains of gold could not satisfy his 
greed, and a world filled with things that minis- 
ter to the senses could not hush the clamor of 
his appetites. The more ample and varied his 
possessions become, the stronger and more un- 
controllable grows his longing for enjoyment. 
He tunnels the mountains, he spans the oceans ; 
he flies on vaporous wings; he harnesses the 
lightning to carry him and his words to the 
ends of the earth; he takes possession of 
the products of every zone and of every kind of 
skill. All things become for him the materials 
for the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupis- 
cence of the eyes, and the pride of life. And 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 263 

still he hungers and thirsts for new sensations. 
He becomes the slave and victim of low desire. 
The passions, which are meant for life and joy, 
are perverted to the service of misery and death. 
Their reek rises to darken the mind, to harden 
the heart, and to paralyze the will. Love is 
driven from its celestial home and cast into the 
soil and mire of the animal nature. The soul is 
bowed beneath the weight of the body and com- 
pelled to do its ignoble behests. The stress of 
life is transferred from reason and conscience to 
the senses. The voluptuary exults not in great 
thoughts and high purposes, but crawls crippled 
and bedraggled through the sloughs of animal- 
ism; and when he has sunk to the depths he 
becomes a contemner. 

He who loves not God, loves but himself; 
and the self without God is but a thing of flesh 
and blood, of sensation and passion. Virtue is 
love rightly ordered, and disorderly love is the 
mother of all depravity. In nothing is this seen 
in such lurid light as in the perversion of the 
instinct which, intended for the propagation of 
the race, is debased to a means of moral and 
physical degradation and death. More than 
war and pest and famine and drunkenness, this 
abject vice dishonors, blights, and poisons the 
flower and fruit of human life. It murders love 
and makes hope a mockery and a curse. It de- 



264 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

files with its polluting touch the brow of child- 
hood, the check of youth, the lips of maiden- 
hood. It hangs like a mildew on the soul, 
rendering it incapable of faith or honor or truth, 
of pure devotion to any worthy cause or being. 
Like the serpent's in paradise, its foul breath 
makes a waste in homes where all was joy and 
innocence. It is the accomplice of shame and 
disease, and injects into the blood of families 
and nations a mortal taint. It is the enemy of 
genius, of art, of freedom, of progress, of relig- 
ion ; and above all of woman, who has been and 
Still is its victim and symbol of dishonor. In a 
thousand cities to-day, as in ancient times, this 
abject vice has its temples innumerable, in which 
woman is the priestess. 

blessed be Christ, the virgin Son of a virgin 
Mother, who has taught us that chastity is the 
mother of all virtue, the bride of faith, hope, 
and love ; the sister of beauty, strength, and 
goodness; the companion of meekness and 
peace ! And blessed be the Church, who has 
never in any age or any land lowered the ban- 
ner on which is inscribed, Humility, Poverty, 

Chastity 1 conquering through Love! 

1 think of her most gladly, not when I recall 
her great history, her permanence iii the world, 
the invincible courage with which she has with- 
stood oppressors, heresiarchs, and mobs clamor- 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 265 

ing for blood; the indefectible vigor with which 
she overcomes and survives her foes, whether 
they be from within or from without; the 
solemn splendor of her rites and ceremonies; 
the majestic cathedrals that lift the cross above 
the noise and tumult of cities into the pure air 
of heaven ; the monastic piles with which she 
has crowned a thousand hills, with the music of 
whose bells and sacred chants she has filled and 
consecrated a thousand vales, — not when I 
remember all this does my heart thrill with the 
deepest emotion; but when I turn my thoughts 
to that innumerable army of virgins, angels of 
innocence and purity, who in every age and in 
many lands lead the life of solitude and con- 
templation, of simplicity and benignity; who, 
though clothed in austere garb, bear brave and 
cheerful hearts, aglow with love, while they 
minister to the sick, the abandoned, the fallen, 
whether crushed by the weight of sin or that 
of solitary age and poverty; who nourish and 
form the religious spirit in childhood, making 
it reverent, devout, and chaste; who offer cease- 
less prayers to Heaven and give to the world 
the highest examples of what Christ would have 
his followers become; working without a 
thought of what men may say of them, telling 
their good deeds not even to God. 

To repeat what elsewhere I have said of this 



266 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

army of Catholic virgins, they are but the living 
forms of patience and service, of humility and 
love. What matter where their cradles stood, 
amid what scenes they grew, what arms held 
them, or what lips kissed their infant brows? 
They came from God, they ministered to human 
suffering and sorrow, they returned to God. 
This is the sum of their life's story ; this is all 
they cared to know of themselves ; this is all 
we need know of them. But though they would 
hide themselves, the divine beauty and power 
of their lives cannot be hidden. They are 
permanently interesting, as whoever makes the 
supreme act of perfect self-sacrifice fe interest- 
ing. To the thoughtless and the frivolous such 
an existence may seem dull and monotonous, 
as a superficial view leads us to think that to 
live is to change. But when we look deeper 
we find that life is a continuous triumph over 
that which changes. As in God it is immutable, 
so in man it tends to a state of permanence by 
identifying itself more and more with truth, 
goodness, and beauty, which are forever the 
same. To live in the highest sense is to find 
and recognize oneself in all things, remaining 
constant in the midst of a transitory and evanes- 
cent world. The realm of consciousness for these 
consecrated virgins is not narrow: their love 
and sympathy are wide as the heart of Christ. 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 267 

As we find ourselves in giving ourselves to 
wife and children, to God and country, to truth 
and honor, so they in abandoning all find a 
nobler and a sweeter life. They are the repre- 
sentatives of the highest devotion, the purest 
love, and the most beneficent sympathies of the 
human heart. They are the heroines of the 
service of humanity ; the priestesses who keep 
aglow the fire of the divine charity which Christ 
came to kindle in the world. In their youth 
they drank at the fountain which quenches 
thirst forever; in their springtime bloom they 
saw through the veil that hides or blurs the 
image of the Eternal, and ever after they walk 
waiting for God. Since religion in its deepest 
sense is a life more than a doctrine, our sister- 
hoods are an argument for the truth of the 
Catholic faith, whose force seems to render all 
our controversies, apologies, and schemes of 
edification more or less idle. These silent 
armies, moving in obedience to the whisperings 
of the unseen Master, make us invincible. So 
long as, generation after generation, tens of 
thousands of the purest, gentlest souls find that 
the love of Christ constrains them, Christ lives 
and rules. This is the marvellous thing that has 
impressed some of the greatest minds. Heroes 
and orators grow to be themes for declamation, 
but the purest and the best follow close to 



268 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

Christ, and devote themselves to Him with a 
personal sense of love as strong as that of a 
mother for her child. 

They who know our sisterhoods most thor- 
oughly, best know that this is simple truth. 
Their lives bear witness to the divinity and 
power of the Saviour with a force and elo- 
quence to which mere words cannot attain. In 
the midst of weakness they are strong ; in the 
midst of trouble they are calm; in the pres- 
ence of death they are joyful. They are rich 
enough though poor; happy enough though 
beset by trials. In solitude, they are full of 
peace ; far from the world, their pure thoughts 
keep them company; forgotten of men, they 
are at home with God. There is about them 
the serene air of immortal things. They have 
the assurance that it is well with them whatever 
may lie beyond. The bonds which love weaves 
around us are not chains, but freedom's livery. 
The most generous are the happiest; and the 
most fortunate are not those who receive or 
gain the greatest possessions, but those who 
with a loving heart make the greatest sacri- 
fices. They are not confused or dominated 
by the problems and doubts of their time, but 
rise from out the riddles of existence into se- 
rene worlds where duty is plain. Passing by 
the unfathomable mysteries of human life, they 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 269 

do their work with hearts as glad as that of a 
child singing in its father's house. 

In countless homes into which an unclean 
spirit could not enter and live, the mothers 
have received their exalted faith in the priceless 
worth of purity from the lips and hearts of nuns. 
In thousands of parishes the light of Catholic 
truth and love shines from the convent with a 
more pervasive and unremitting glow than from 
the pulpit; and as a gentleman is best known 
by his behavior to women, so a true priest is 
discovered by the reverence and consideration 
he shows to nuns. Bigotry itself, narrow and 
obdurate, ready almost to hate the good it is 
forced to recognize in those whose creed it 
abhors, cannot long withstand the test of con- 
tact with these simple, gentle, and true-hearted 
women. How infinitely poorer, coarser, more 
frivolous, and sensual life would be were it not 
for them ! 

Oh, the wealth of love in a woman's heart ! — 
the wife's unconquerable truth and loyalty, the 
mother's tenderness and affection; the bloom 
and warmth, the freshness and fragrance of a 
virgin's soul when the mystic voice first awakens 
it to conscious life ! Oh, the countless oratories 
where hearts are bowed in the silent service of 
a boundless devotion, giving all and asking 
nothing; knowing only that God is, and that 



270 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 



He is love ! From the thousand books wherein 
I read that we can know nothing of the infinite 
mystery, that all is dark and cold and meaning- 
less; that faith deceives, that hope deludes, that 
love betrays, that religion is but a dream of un- 
happy creatures who awake from the bosom of 
the infinite unconscious, and live only long 
enough to know their misery — from all this 
bleak and wintry waste, full of darkness and 
death, I turn to the pure hearts of women who 
love, and again the light plays around me. I 
drink the balmy air ; the birds sing, the waters 
leap for joy, the mountains lift their heads ; and 
I am in God's world and am His child. 

When glancing athwart many a sad and gloomy 
page of history, I read of schism and heresy, of 
hate and cruelty; of bitter controversies that 
never end ; of pride and ambition, of greed and 
lust — I think of the hosts of holy women who 
have followed the Church, like the chosen few 
who followed Christ on the narrow blood-stained 
way that led to Calvary ; who watch and wait, 
who serve and are helpful, who work and are 
silent; and lam certain that the cause which 
century after century thus constrains thousands 
of the purest and gentlest hearts to sacrifice 
their lives to the highest and most unselfish 
ends, is the cause of God, the cause for which 
Christ suffered and died. 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 271 

Something of all this, my dear Ladies and 
Sisters of the Sacred Heart, may be deemed 
appropriate as part of the celebration of the 
centenary of the foundation of your society, 
which sprang from the heart of Jesus, the open 
and exhaustless fountain of the pure love of God 
and man. As life is a continuous victory over 
its changing environments, it is natural that the 
soul should seek to fix what is fleeting in its 
existence by holding steadfastly to the times 
and places that are most sacred. Thus in mem- 
ory we are glad to gather about the homes of 
our childhood, while the fields and the hills, the 
clouds and the stars, the birds and the domestic 
animals, even, return to help to complete the 
scene, from the midst of which those about 
whom our earliest and purest affections centred, 
look forth upon us again with a love that seems 
eternal. The seasons come and depart, the 
flowers bloom and fade, the young grow old and 
the old pass away, but the soul is an abiding 
principle of life and love, which, though the 
visible universe should vanish utterly, would still 
find itself at home with the Eternal, with God. 
The stronger the individual, the more permanent 
the family, the more vital and persistent the re- 
ligion, the greater is the power to inspire memo- 
ries that last. Saints and heroes are the hinges 
on which the opening and shutting doors of 



272 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

history turn. When the family is abiding, as 
with the Israelites, the whole people look back 
from generation to generation, to their fathers, 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; and to the God of 
their fathers. 

The Church, a religion of historic continuity, 
a religion which returns even to the beginning, 
to the promise of the Messiah, and comes down 
through the ages with the chosen people, 
through captivity and dispersion and seeming 
destruction, until the Desired of the nations is 
born, — what a weight of memories she bears ! 
what dates and shrines, what saints and heroes 
are hers ! She fills the days and the years with 
solemn festivals in commemoration of the 
Saviour and of those who have loved Him with 
a perfect love. At His birth what glad songs 
break forth from a chill and ice-bound earth; 
what merry laughter of children, what happy 
hearts are gathered around blazing hearths, 
full of pleasant and cheering thoughts, because 
Christ is born ! And when He enters on His 
passion and agony, and bows His head con- 
senting to death, though the sunshine be golden, 
the air balmy, and all nature fair and fragrant, 
again darkness falls upon the world and a stone 
is rolled upon the human heart. But when He 
rises, we too laugh with the flowers and sing 
with the birds; serene as the azure skies, we 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 273 

feel the thrill of immortal joy; a new spirit 
within telling us that once having risen to the 
life of the soul, we can never wholly die. 

As in devout reverence the Church follows 
with sacred and solemn ritual her Divine Lord 
from the announcement of His birth even to 
His ascension into heaven, so she keeps vigil 
and festival with His saints — apostles, con- 
fessors, martyrs, virgins. And among them 
she loves to place the founders of religious 
orders and societies. It is, then, in a right 
Catholic spirit that to-day in many lands the 
daughters of the brave, humble, loving, and 
faithful woman who established the Society 
of the Sacred Heart a hundred years ago are 
gathered, that the memory of her and her work 
may inspire in them a purer love of the Divine 
Master and a more unconquerable purpose to 
labor even unto death in the cause for which 
He lived and died. She has not as yet been 
placed in the calendar of the canonized, but 
who can doubt that she is a saint and a mother 
of saints? 

At the time when the Revolution had devas- 
tated the Church in France, had desecrated her 
sacred edifices, had made martyrs or exiles of 
her priests and religious, had enthroned on the 
high altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame a 
shameless woman as the symbol of a bestial 

18 



274 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

v/orship ; when millions believed that infidelity 
had finally triumphed, and that the religion of 
Christ was to be blotted from the earth, a country 
girl, Sophia Madeleine Barat, the daughter of 
an artisan in Burgundy, the land of St. Bernard 
and of Bossuet, finding her soul all aflame with 
divine love, was led, under the guidance of a 
holy priest, to establish the Society of the Sacred 
Heart. She had been educated by her brother, 
a priest also, who had given her a thorough re- 
ligious training and a good knowledge of the 
classics. She was only twenty-one years old, 
of delicate bodily frame, but strong in mind, 
firm of purpose, and capable of boundless devo- 
tion. She had the qualities of the true French- 
woman — common-sense, tact, knowledge of the 
management of men and affairs, quick wit, self- 
forgetfulness, industry, economy, cheerfulness, 
and courage. Above all she had a reverent, de- 
vout, and ardent soul that felt that God is love, 
that Christ is divine love made human, and that 
in comparison with this love all other things are 
light as air and trivial as dust. 

Religious asceticism — heroic humility, vol- 
untary poverty and perfect chastity — is for 
the sake of love, as military asceticism is 
for the sake of glory, and monetary asceti- 
cism for the sake of pelf. As the warrior and 
the miser find self-denial easy, much more are 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 275 

they who greatly love able to abstain and 
renounce. " A wise man needs but little," 
Madam Barat was wont to say, " and a 
saint still less." And all that she seemed to 
feel the need of was to love the Lord, and in 
lowliness of spirit and entire disinterestedness to 
follow after Him in the service of the little ones, 
of whom He said, " Of such is the kingdom of 
heaven." 

But why should I utter the praises of her 
who, with the instinct of good sense and great 
virtue, turned resolutely from whatever minis- 
ters to vanity? To be praised for love and love's 
work seems little less than profanation; and 
when we are wholly in earnest, words of flattery 
are as disagreeable as the buzzing of insects. 
In the presence of heroic souls vain speech is 
doubly vain ; and we best show our reverence 
for the noble dead, not by eulogy, but by acting 
in their spirit and by faithfully striving to con- 
tinue the work they began. If your venerable 
foundress could in bodily presence be here 
to-day to rejoice with us in all that God has 
wrought through the handmaidens of the Sacred 
Heart, she would crave, not laudatory utterance, 
but elevation of soul, thoughts that breathe 
faith and hope, courage and love. She would 
ask us to dwell on the marvellous beneficent 
work of the society during the first century of 



276 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

its existence, only that we might thence derive 
greater confidence in God, more devout love 
for the Divine Saviour, and more complete con- 
secration of our lives to the cause for which He 
lived and died. For as much love as there is 
in us, so much religion, so much power; and 
as much self-seeking, so much limitation. The 
only true prosperity is prosperity of soul; and 
material progress, unless it be sustained by relig- 
ious and moral progress, ends in decadence and 
ruin. If all is well within, circumstances are 
never intolerable ; but if inner wholeness be 
lacking, we are wretched though we be clothed 
with the pomp and majesty of kings. 

What a gracious inspiration was that of 
Madam Barat, who, when she was drawn to 
found a society whose chief work should be 
education, felt that first of all it was necessary 
that she should baptize herself and her com- 
panions in the fountain-head of divine Love? 
For love alone can educate. The love of what 
is higher than ourselves ; the love that bears us 
upward on the wings of hope and aspiration, of 
imagination and desire, toward perfect truth, 
beauty, and goodness, as they are found in God, 
is the power that creates the greatest and the 
noblest men and women, whether they be 
saints, sages, heroes, or supreme poets. It is 
because her love is the purest and most abiding 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 2J*J 

that the mother is the greatest of all teachers ; 
and it is because the Church has a mother's 
heart, which the worldlings and politicians who 
at times seem to control her have never been 
able to chill, that she is the great school of 
saints. 

Education is largely persuasion, and they per- 
suade best who make themselves best loved ; and 
the best loved are the most loving. When there 
is question of moral and religious truth, — above 
all, of wisdom and goodness, — the surest appeal 
is through the heart to the mind. But the heart 
can be touched only by those who have a heart. 
If we would lead men to love God, we ourselves 
must love them and Him. Education, when 
given by the vain and conceited, but inspires 
a more insidious kind of self-love ; whereas its 
true end is to make us understand and feel that 
it is only when we lose sight of ourselves in the 
pursuit of what is greater than we, of what is 
eternally right and fair, that we enter on the 
way that leads to a high and blessed life. " The 
entire object of education is to make people not 
merely do the right things, but enjoy the right 
things ; not merely industrious but to love indus- 
try; not merely learned, but to love knowledge; 
not merely pure, but to love purity; not merely 
just, but to hunger and thirst after justice. ,, 

Madam Barat used to say to her mistresses 



2j8 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

that to become a stream one must first be a 
fountain-head. We can give but what we have ; 
and, in the deepest sense, we can teach but what 
we love. Is it credible that they who work for 
money should do more perfect work and be 
made thereby more perfect than they who work 
for truth and love? The ideal which our striv- 
ing and yearning have made living within us 
stamps itself on the minds and hearts of those 
whom w r e influence. The life we lead, vastly 
more than the words we speak, makes us 
centres of light and force. Wherever there 
is a deeply religious spirit, there is a sanctu- 
ary; wherever there is a high and luminous 
soul, there is a school. Of the living the living 
are born — like of like. 

The world in which woman's being may 
unfold itself is widening and deepening. For 
her, too, henceforth the career is open to make 
use of talent. She may do whatever high or 
fair or useful thing she can make herself able 
to do. She, like man, has the right to gain a 
livelihood, and the nobler right to live in ever- 
broadening spheres of religious, moral, and 
intellectual sympathy and influence. In her 
education, therefore, there should be no lack 
of thoroughness, no showy superficiality, no 
excessive attention to mere accomplishments. 
She must be led into deep and serious sub- 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 2JC) 

jects ; her heart and imagination must be kept 
in a pure and lofty element of thought. What- 
ever expresses the highest moods and states to 
which the human spirit may attain, whether it 
be religion or patriotism or art or literature, has 
inestimable worth for her, since it is a sign and 
symbol of her kinship with the world of invisi- 
ble and real things — of her kinship with God. 
The decisive consideration for her also is not 
what knowledge is most entertaining or useful, 
but what knowledge is best adapted to form 
the mind and to confirm character. 

She must become accustomed from her child- 
hood to plain food and simple ways, that she 
may never lose the power to take delight in in- 
nocent amusements and pure pleasures. Let 
her love beauty, and strive to make herself and 
the world beautiful ; but let her understand that 
a hard and proud heart, a vacant and vulgar 
mind, not a plain face, is ugly; and that a 
countenance over which innocence, cheerfulness, 
and intelligence are diffused is necessarily fair. 
Vanity and selfishness, greed and sensuality, 
envy and pride, spite and cowardice, spoil all 
loveliness and mar all life. Nothing horrible or 
dreadful can happen to us except through our 
own fault and folly ; and the greatest misery is 
the consciousness of our own sin. Virtue alone 
brings sure and abiding joy. It is praiseworthy, 



280 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

and without it nothing is so. Behavior, rather 
than knowledge, is the end of education. Hence 
its foundation is moral, and therefore religious ; 
and where in the modern world we are intent on 
sharpening the wits without first laying this 
moral and religious foundation, the inevitable 
result must be the blighting of the noblest 
flower and fruit of human life. 

Education, indeed, can but unfold the being 
we have received. It cannot make a poet of a 
mathematician, a great mind of a small one. 
But it should not be our concern to become great 
men or great women, it being our business to 
make of ourselves genuine men and genuine 
women ; and right education, aided by each one's 
industry and good-will, can effect this for all. 
Let no woman believe there is aught of good in 
weakness. There is no joy but in strength — 
strength of body, strength of mind, strength of 
heart, strength of soul. " To be weak is to be 
miserable. " Faith is strength, virtue is strength, 
wisdom is strength, love is strength, health is 
strength. What a happy thing it is that the 
higher education of women tends to make them 
physically even superior to their sisters who are 
content with idleness and ignorance ! To live in 
the mind, to walk in the light of high ideals, to 
cherish a noble purpose, to strive in a worthy 
cause, gives freshness and vigor to the body, 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 28 1 

even, whereas it is weakened and wasted by a 
frivolous, aimless, self-indulgent kind of ex- 
istence. 

It was Madam Barat's desire to form valiant 
women — women, able to do and suffer, to coun- 
sel and rule. She believed that women, when 
their souls bathe in the fountains of divine love, 
may have the spirit and fortitude of men. Nay, 
at times she was tempted to think that the men 
of her day had become weaklings, and that God 
was calling women to do the work which re- 
quires heroic hearts and boundless devotion. 
It gives her delight when she finds her nuns 
filled with courage and energy ; when their re- 
liance on God banishes all disquietude, even in 
the midst of revolution and pestilence. " How 
seldom," she exclaims, " are valiant women to 
be found ! The Bible says they are more 
precious than pearls and diamonds; and what 
praise it goes on to bestow upon them ! Let 
us, then, labor with all our might to train such 
women, at whatever cost to ourselves. They in 
turn will train others, and the good work will 
proceed; for in this century we cannot rely 
upon men for the preservation of the faith. It 
is to the weaker sex that this task is entrusted. 
O Altitudo! How God's thoughts differ from 
our thoughts ! But He is Almighty." 

Her first aim was holiness through the love 



282 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION 

of the Lord ; and after this it was her most 
ardent desire to form valiant women, who, 
clothed with chastity and comeliness, filled with 
faith and zeal, should bend all the energies of 
cultivated minds and generous hearts, in what- 
ever sphere of life they might be thrown, to the 
apostolic work of the salvation of souls. And 
in doing this she seems to have had a special 
gift, and to have succeeded beyond all others 
who have founded religious communities in our 
century. This at least is the testimony which 
Americans who are acquainted with what the 
Ladies of the Sacred Heart have accomplished 
in our own land can hardly refuse to bear. 
What noble, gracious, loving, and helpful women, 
whether they labor within convent walls or in 
wider spheres of action, have been educated in 
their schools ! In a hundred cities, in a thou- 
sand homes, they are centres whence radiate 
purity and love, sweetness and light. They are 
strong and gentle, they are patient and mild, 
they are wise and helpful. They rule not alone 
in the house, but in the hearts and minds of 
fathers, husbands, and sons, who, when experi- 
ence has taught them how sordid, hard, and 
narrow so many of their fellows are, think of 
these noble and gracious women, and are certain 
that in human nature there is a godlike power 
of truth, goodness, and beauty. 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 283 

How shall I permit this occasion to pass 
without turning my thought to Madam Hardey, 
one of the first pupils of the Sacred Heart in 
America and the foundress of many homes of 
religion and learning, whom it was my good 
fortune to know and to honor and reverence 
almost above all other women ! Had Madam 
Barat done nothing for America but to train her 
and give her opportunity for the exercise of her 
great talents, she would have made us forever 
her debtors. What a fund of good sense, what 
a balance of judgment, what a sentiment of 
justice, what endurance of labor and trial, what 
power of love and helpfulness, what a strong and 
serene spirit there was in her ! She had the 
gift to make authority lovable; and where she 
ruled, the wise and virtuous wished that she 
might never cease to rule. She was born to 
govern, and in obeying her all felt that they 
were hearkening to the voice of reason and 
doing the will of God. How wholly unselfish, 
how free from vanity, how incapable of deceit 
she was ! How tolerant, how large of mind and 
heart, how able and ready to sympathize with 
all who have good-will ! 

Though loved with a tender devotion which 
few have known, and followed with a confidence 
that never questions aught, though honored and 
consulted by the rich and fashionable, not less 



284 RELIGION, AGNOSTICISM, EDUCATION. 

than by priests and bishops, Madam Hardey 
retained always the perfect simplicity of speech 
and action which belongs only to the most inno- 
cent or the greatest souls. She knew how to 
adapt herself to every situation and to the most 
various dispositions. No one left her presence 
without having been made braver and better. To 
know her was to understand the supreme worth 
of character when it is moulded by religious 
faith and love. She was as ready to sweep a 
room as to plan the foundation of a great con- 
vent, and whatever she did appeared to be 
the right thing to do. Occupied for nearly the 
whole of her life with financial affairs and the 
government of the houses she had established, 
she kept the fervor of her early piety and a 
novice's scrupulous fidelity in the observance of 
the rule. One felt that her wisdom and strength 
came from within, — from a soul that dwelled 
in habitual loving communion with God. Apart 
from Him she understood that no good could 
possibly come to her, and that as He was the 
end so was He the principle of her being. 

At the age of sixteen, in the flower of health 
and beauty, she had seen the vanity of all that 
comes to end, and had turned with resolute will 
from her happy home and the promises of the 
world, to give her whole heart to the service of 
the Blessed Saviour; and for sixty years, even 



THE VICTORY OF LOVE. 285 

unto death, she followed after Him with a 
courage that never failed and a love that never 
grew cold. Her body lies in France, but her 
spirit is here, — a living force to cheer and 
strengthen, to uplift and guide. Her life and 
example have become a permanent possession, 
and we can never think meanly of ourselves 
while we remember that she was our sister and 
mother. 



PRINTED FOR A. C. McCLURG & CO. BY 
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, JOHN WILSON 
& SON (INC.), CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. 



^ 



& 



^ 



JUN 141902 

1 COPY DEL. rOCAT.DIV. 
JUN. 14 1902 

JUN. 21 I 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: March 2005 



PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




013 752 753 4( 







